Which countries speak Russian?

Russian is one of 6 official UN languages, and one of the OSCE’s working languages.

The Russian language occupies an honorable 5th place in the world in terms of the degree of prevalence. About 300 million people speak the language. Russian is native for 160 million. It’s 8th position in the world. Russian recently came out in the second position after English as most used language in internet!

Let’s see which countries speak or understand the Russian language:

• All the countries of the former Soviet Union:

Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania.

• Germany:  

About 6 million speak Russian to varying degrees in Germany. This high level is partly due to the large number of Germans who moved to Germany from the territory of Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and the knowledge of Russian is also affected by the knowledge of Russian by residents of the former GDR, where it was taught in schools and universities

• Israel:

About one million people now speak Russian in the State of Israel, although the total population of the country is only 7 million people.

• Eastern Europe:

According to the newspaper “Rzeczpospolita”, the growth of interest of Polish youth to Russian is primarily due to economic reasons. Russian is still the most spoken language in Europe geographically and in terms of the number of speakers. Many Russian and Western companies that came to Poland in the late 1990s put Russian language proficiency as a condition.

Many people, especially the older generation, know or understand Russian in countries such as Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Serbia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro. First, because of the similarity of Slavic languages, and secondly, that the countries of Eastern Europe taught Russian in school.

• Unite States:

The Russian language is spoken by one and a half million people, most of them live in New York and the state of New York, because of a big number of emigrants from former USSR. There are many Russian speakers also in the states of California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Washington, Florida.

• Other countries:

Russian is also popular in countries such as China, Turkey, Thailand, Mongolia. The extent to which the Russian language is spoken in these countries depends mainly on economic factors.

Are you thinking of learning Russian?

It is very easy to start from free Alphabet course here: Russian Courses