- ISO 639
ru- Its own name
- русский
- Script
- Cyrillic
- Direction
- Left to right
Russian
Russian (русский) is spoken by 201.1M people across 23 territories in CLDR, and is official nationally in 5 of them. Russia holds 66% of its speakers.
Reach summary
What one translation into Russian covers, across every market that speaks it.
Speakers
201.1M
Russia 66% · Ukraine 8% · Kazakhstan 7%
First and second language speakers, summed across the 23 territories CLDR records. The bar splits them by territory.
Online speakers
185.2M
0%100%
92% of speakers, once each territory's speaker count is scaled by its World Bank internet rate. Territories with no internet figure contribute nothing, so this is a floor.
Concentration
66%
0%100%
Russia, the largest single territory, holds 66% of speakers. Spread out enough that regional wording and currency will come up.
Territories
23
5 where it is official nationally, 11 where at least one person in five speaks it. The rest are diaspora and minority populations, which CLDR does record.
Reachable GDP
$43.1T
Combined GDP of every territory where the language appears. It counts whole economies, not the speakers' share, so read it as an upper bound.
Translation rate
1.10×
1.0×1.6×+
About 10% above a mainstream pair, reflecting how many vendors work in it. It feeds the budget estimator.
Where Russian is spoken
Every territory CLDR records, largest speaker count first. Share is of that territory's own population, so the column has no total.
| Territory | Share of that market | Speakers | Online | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RussiaRU | 94% | 132.4M | 124.9M | official |
| UkraineUA | 46% | 16.4M | 13.5M | official |
| KazakhstanKZ | 72% | 14.6M | 13.6M | official |
| PolandPL | 18% | 7M | 6.2M | minority or diaspora |
| BelarusBY | 71% | 6.7M | 6.4M | official |
| UzbekistanUZ | 14% | 5.1M | 4.6M | minority or diaspora |
| GermanyDE | 6% | 5M | 4.7M | minority or diaspora |
| KyrgyzstanKG | 36% | 2.2M | 2M | official |
| LithuaniaLT | 80% | 2.1M | 1.9M | major |
| ArmeniaAM | 65% | 1.9M | 1.6M | major |
| BulgariaBG | 23% | 1.6M | 1.3M | major |
| TajikistanTJ | 12% | 1.2M | 695.9K | minority or diaspora |
| IsraelIL | 11% | 1M | 912.1K | minority or diaspora |
| United StatesUS | 0.3% | 820.7K | 777.2K | minority or diaspora |
| TurkmenistanTM | 12% | 689.3K | 124K | minority or diaspora |
| LatviaLV | 38% | 684.5K | 634.6K | major |
| EstoniaEE | 56% | 668.5K | 616.6K | major |
| GeorgiaGE | 9% | 441.1K | 369.6K | minority or diaspora |
| CanadaCA | 0.9% | 329.8K | 311.1K | minority or diaspora |
| MoldovaMD | 3% | 108K | 83.5K | minority or diaspora |
| FinlandFI | 0.9% | 45.6K | 42.7K | minority or diaspora |
| MongoliaMN | 0.2% | 3.9K | 3.4K | minority or diaspora |
| Svalbard & Jan MayenSJ | 41% | 1.2K | — | major |
CLDR does record diaspora populations, so a language usually appears in more territories than its home markets, at small shares. Those rows rarely justify a launch on their own, but they are why total reach runs higher than any one country page shows. A dash in the online column means no World Bank internet figure, not zero.
What it takes to ship
The work that is not translation.
Writing system
Cyrillic
Lays out left to right, the same as the source. Platform default fonts cover this script.
Plural categories
4
Every counted message needs up to 4 arms, and the translator needs all of them.
Rate index
1.10×
Prices about 10% above a mainstream pair.
Engineering note. +20-40% string expansion.