stylistic:tone
Demographics

In the eldership of Vilkpėdė, remnants of a Magdalenian settlement were found which date to c. 10000 BC. Kairėnai, Pūčkoriai and Naujoji Vilnia had large settlements during the first millennium AD. The most densely-populated area was the confluence of the Neris and Vilnia, which had fortified homesteads.

According to some historians, Vilnius could have been a city during the Kingdom of Lithuania times: King Mindaugas did not permanently live there, however, may have built Lithuania's first Catholic church for his coronation there. It is well established, however, that Vilnius existed as a city during the times of Traidenis and Vytenis. The first mention in the historical sources as a capital in 1323 in the letters to the Western cities of Gediminas.

It became a multicultural city, with 14th-century sources noting that it consisted of a Great (Lithuanian) city and a Ruthenian one. By the 16th century, German merchants, artisans, Jews and Tatars had also settled in Vilnius. During the 16th– and 17th-century Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the city's Polish-speaking population began to grow; by the middle of the 17th century, most writing was in Polish. City was inhabited by a large number of Italian and Swiss artisans as well and generally all the European nations were presented to an extent (those included Vilnius university professors and students among whom there were French, Spanish, Swedes and even some Croatians as Tomaš Zdelarius, musicians at the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania or such military servants as Hungarian Gáspár Bekes). Because of many nations inhabiting the city, in the 16th-18th. centuries it was known and nicknamed in Western sources as Babylon of Europe.

After World War II, the number of ethnic Lithuanians in Vilnius rebounded; however, Lithuanization was replaced with Sovietization. Following independence in 1990, Vilnius' ethnic-Lithuanian population increased to 63.2 percent in 2011 and 67.44 percent in 2021.