how many people in Romania can speak the Russian language?
22,355,551 people speak Romanian, and 29,890 speak Russian. Here is the total list: Languages of Romania [See also SIL publications on the languages of Romania.] Romania. 22,355,551. National or official language: Romanian. Literacy rate: 96% to 98%. Also includes Armenian (762), Czech (3,339), Eastern Yiddish (1,100), Gheg Albanian (484), Italian (2,563), Russian (29,890), Slovak (16,108), Ukrainian (57,593). Information mainly from André Du Nay 1977; I. Hancock 1979, 1987, 1988; F. B. Agard 1984; B. Comrie 1987. Blind population: 15,918. Deaf population: 1,405,464. Deaf institutions: 20. The number of languages listed for Romania is 15. Of those, all are living languages. Sources: http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?
98.8% of Romania’s population speaks one of three major languages, none of which are Russian. 1.2% of the population, or about 2.6 million, speak something else. So there’s our outer threshold. There are about 36,000 Lipovans in Romania as of 2002, the last census. These are native Russian-speaking people. An additional 61,000 Ukrainians also live in Russia, most or all of whom presumably speak Russian, since it was the language of the USSR until quite recently, generationally speaking. Any of this number that doesn’t speak Russian is made up in the about 6000 Jews in Romania, a significant portion of whom would be from countries once part of the USSR and thus Russian-speaking. Total this up, and you get about 97,000 Russian speakers in Romania. Some percentage of the population may have studied it as a second language, but it is not among the more popular second languages taught there. An estimate of 100,000, then, is as precise as research could take me.
