Elanikud

Elanikud is the Estonian term for the residents or inhabitants of a given place. It denotes people who live in a specific area, such as a city, municipality, district, or neighborhood, and is commonly used in geographic, administrative, and demographic contexts. The word is the plural form of elanik, the singular for an inhabitant.

In official usage, elanikud appear in statistics, planning, and local governance. They are counted in censuses and population registers to describe who resides in an area and to allocate services or determine eligibility for programs. The term often appears together with qualifiers such as age groups or timeframes, for example, elanikud vanuses 18–64 or elanikud ühel aastal. A related concept is elanikkond, which broadly means population and can refer to the resident population of a larger region rather than a single locality.

Etymology and related terms: elanik is derived from the Estonian root related to living in a place, and elanikud is its plural. A broader term, elanikkond, refers to the total population of a region, including permanent residents and sometimes temporary residents, depending on the context.

In historical and social research, elanikud are described based on records such as censuses, tax lists, or parish archives to reconstruct who lived in a place at a specific time. The usage is largely regional and context-dependent, but it remains a standard word for discussing local resident populations in Estonian. See also elanik, elanikkond.