There are an estimated 6 million Bulgarians and over, including children from mixed marriages, living outside Bulgaria, said in an interview for Trud newspaper Petar Haralampiev, chair of the State Agency for Bulgarians Abroad.

There are Bulgarian communities in Northern Greece, in Albania there are 150,000 - 500,000 people of Bulgarian origin, in Kosovo 60,000 – 200,000, in Romania 50,000 – 200,000, in Ukraine – 210,000 people officially registered as being Bulgarian during the 2002 census.  There are more than 200,000 Bulgarians in Chicago, USA, and the environs. According to unofficial data from different official Bulgarian sources, 2.3 – 3 million people have left Bulgaria in the post-1989 period alone. The other group are Bulgarians from what are known as the “traditional migrant communities”, people who emigrated in the first half of the 20^th century. There are around 50,000 people of Bulgarian descent in Argentina, for example, who fall into this group.

According to official Eurostat data, the sum of data from 2011 indicate there are 1, 023,248 people born in Bulgaria living around the world, Trud writes.