Where Russian is spoken
Russian is spoken in 26 countries: Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Poland and 22 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.
| Country | Share of population | Estimated speakers |
|---|---|---|
| Russia | 94% | 132,371,740 |
| Ukraine | 46% | 16,404,428 |
| Kazakhstan | 72% | 14,587,200 |
| Poland | 18% | 6,974,334 |
| Belarus | 71% | 6,746,030 |
| Uzbekistan | 14% | 5,112,884 |
| Germany | 6% | 5,047,146 |
| Kyrgyzstan | 36% | 2,221,956 |
| Lithuania | 80% | 2,102,552 |
| Armenia | 65% | 1,934,900 |
| Bulgaria | 23% | 1,560,012 |
| Tajikistan | 12% | 1,247,292 |
| Israel | 11% | 1,034,288 |
| United States | 0.2% | 820,711 |
| Turkmenistan | 12% | 689,298 |
| Latvia | 38% | 684,475 |
| Estonia | 56% | 668,522 |
| Georgia | 9% | 441,086 |
| Canada | 0.9% | 329,756 |
| Moldova | 3% | 107,986 |
| Finland | 0.8% | 45,574 |
| Mongolia | 0.1% | 3,938 |
| China | Not given | Not given |
| North Korea | Not given | Not given |
| Norway | Not given | Not given |
| Romania | Not given | Not given |
Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.
On the map, Russian is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Russian.
How many people speak Russian?
Wikidata gives about 154 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). It also lists about 110.4 million second-language speakers (ethnologue.com, 2010). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.
Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.
Where Russian sits in the language family tree
Glottolog classifies Russian as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.
- Indo-European
- Classical Indo-European
- Balto-Slavic
- Slavic
- East Slavic
- Russian
Related languages
Other languages in the East Slavic group:
- Belarusian (7.6 million speakers)
More about Russian
- Read about Russian on Wikipedia
- Indo-European languages map
- Languages spoken in Russia
- All languages, A to Z
Codes: ISO 639-3 rus, Glottolog russ1263. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.
Questions about Russian
Where is Russian spoken?
Russian is spoken in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Poland and 22 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 94% of the population of Russia, which is about 132,371,740 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.
How many people speak Russian?
Wikidata gives about 154 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled. It also lists about 110.4 million second-language speakers (ethnologue.com, 2010).
Which language family is Russian in?
Glottolog places Russian in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Balto-Slavic, Slavic and East Slavic.