More than 90 Percent of RF Residents Say They Know Russian But Fewer than 80 Percent Use It in Their Daily Life, New Study Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 5 – The 2021 Russian census shows that 134.3 million of the 146 million people of the Russian Federation say that they know Russian but only 111.5 million use it in their daily life, according to a new Russian Academy of Sciences study reported by Tatarstan’s Milliard.Tatar portal.

            Thus, Moscow’s push to get non-Russians to use Russian instead of their native languages so far has been less than fully successful and the share of non-Russians using languages other than Russian on a daily basis roughly the same as their share in the population (milliard.tatar/news/lingvisty-vyyavili-top-5-samyx-populyarnyx-yazykov-rossii-4924).

            At a minimum, these figures should be factored in both to claims about the spread of Russian and despair about the decline of no-Russian languages because quite obviously knowledge of a language and daily use of it are two different things.