Demographics of Siberia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Geographically, Siberia includes the Russian Urals, Siberian, and Far Eastern Federal Districts. Of the latter, only the western part, the Sakha Republic, is sometimes counted as part of Siberia. The north-central parts of Kazakhstan are sometimes included in the region.
Siberia has population density of only three persons per square kilometer. The oblasts with the highest population densities are Chelyabinsk Oblast and Kemerovo Oblast, with 41 and 30 persons per square km, respectively. Koryak Okrug has population density of less than 0.1 per square kilometer.
[edit] Population
- Urals Federal District, population ca. 14.4 million
- Kurgan Oblast, population 1.02 million (2002)
- Sverdlovsk Oblast, population 4.49 million (2002)
- Tyumen Oblast, population 3.26 million (2002)
- Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, population 1.5 million
- Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, population 550,000 inhabitants (2002)
- Chelyabinsk Oblast, population 3.6 million (2002)
- Siberian Federal District , population ca. 20.28 million
- Altai Krai, administrative center — Barnaul, population 2.6 million (2002)
- Altai Republic, capital — Gorno-Altaisk, population 202,947 (2002)
- Buryat Republic, capital — Ulan Ude, population 981,238 (2002)
- Chita Oblast, administrative center — Chita, population 1,155,346 (2002)
- Irkutsk Oblast, administrative center — Irkutsk, population 2.77 million (2002)
- Republic of Khakassia, capital — Abakan, population 575,400.
- Kemerovo Oblast, administrative center — Kemerovo, population 2.90 million (2002)
- Krasnoyarsk Krai, administrative center — Krasnoyarsk, population 2.97 million (2002).
- Novosibirsk Oblast, administrative center — Novosibirsk, population 2.69 million (2002)
- Omsk Oblast, administrative center — Omsk, population 2.08 million (2002)
- Tomsk Oblast, administrative center — Tomsk, population 1.06 million (2002)
- Tuva Republic, capital — Kyzyl, population 305,510 (2002)
- Far Eastern Federal District (Russian Far East), population ca. 7.02 million
- Sakha (Yakutia) Republic, capital — Yakutsk, population 949,280 (2002) — the only Far Eastern region that is sometimes counted as part of Siberia.
Excluding territories of north-central Kazakhstan, Siberia thus has a total population of ca. 35.6 million. The North Kazakhstan oblast has another 1.1 million inhabitants (2002).
About 70% of Siberia's people live in cities. Most city people are crowded into small apartments. Many people in rural areas live in simple, but more spacious, log houses. Novosibirsk is the largest city in Siberia, with a population of about 1.5 million, followed by Yekaterinburg (1.3 million, Urals), Omsk (1.1 million), Chelyabinsk (1.07 million, in the Urals), Krasnoyarsk (0.91 million), Barnaul (0.60 million), Irkutsk (0.59 million), Kemerovo (0.52 million), Tyumen (0.51 million), Tomsk (0.48 million), Nizhny Tagil (0.39 million, Urals), Kurgan (0.36 million), Ulan Ude (0.36 million), Chita (0.32 million).
The above count, however, by including the entire Urals Federal District, includes areas not usually considered part of Siberia, e.g. the cities Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk and Nizhny Tagil listed above.
[edit] Ethnicities and languages
Most Siberians (close to the average measured over all of Russia of 79%) are Russians and Russified Ukrainians, but in certain Oblasts (e.g. Tuva), Slavic population is as low as 20%.
Most non-Slavic groups are Turkic. Smaller linguistic groups are Mongols (ca. 600,000 speakers) Uralic (Samoyedic, Ugric, Yukaghir; roughly 100,000 speakers), Manchu-Tungus (ca. 40,000 speakers), Chukotko-Kamchatkan (ca. 25,000 speakers), Eskimo-Aleut (some 2,000 speakers), and languages isolates, Ket and Nivkh.
Mongolian, Turkic and Manchu-Tungus languages are sometimes taken together under the term Altaic. Uralic and Altaic form the Ural-Altaic group, and the Uralo-Siberian group combines the Ural-Altaic with the Chukotko-Kamchatkan group. These are more umbrella terms than accepted linguistic relationships.
See also: Northern indigenous peoples of Russia, Paleosiberian languages, Eurasiatic languages
