Ethnic Groups and Language

Russia has one of the widest varieties of ethnic groups in the world, but ethnic Russians form the vast majority of the population. In 1991 the non-Russian population constituted only 18 percent of the total, with the largest minority, the Tatars, making up only 3.8 percent. Ukrainians (3 percent) and Chuvash (1.2 percent) are the only other minorities constituting more than 1 percent of the population. Other minorities include Belarusians, Germans, Bashkirs, and Jews (considered an ethnic group in Russia). Thirty-two ethnic groups have their own administrative territories. Thousands of people have left ethnic administrative territories in recent years. Although Birobijan (Jewish Autonomous Region) was originally created for the Jewish people of the Soviet Union, it has never been a major area of Jewish settlement; emigration in the post-Soviet area has caused its Jewish population to become even smaller.

The Russian language is the country’s official language and it is the most commonly spoken in business, government, and education. Ethnic Russians speak their native tongue almost exclusively. People belonging to most other ethnic groups are bilingual. More than 100 languages are spoken in Russia. Some of the ethnic republics have declared official regional languages, but millions of non-Russians have adopted Russian as their mother tongue. Among the most bilingual are the Ingush people, of whom 80 percent were proficient in both Ingush and Russian in 1989. The Soviet government helped many smaller ethnic groups develop their own alphabets and vocabularies. The USSR’s educational policies ensured widespread use of the Russian language, however.