page_title: Demographics of Romania
section_title: Ethnic groups
hierarchical_section_title: Demographics of Romania / Ethnic groups
caption_attribution_description: English: Distribution of ethnic Rroma in Romania according to the 2011 census. Software used: OpenJUMP GIS (http://www.openjump.org/) and Inkscape (http://inkscape.org/).
context_page_description: About 88.9% of the people of Romania are ethnic Romanians, whose language, Romanian, is a Balkan Romance language, descended from Latin with some German, French, English, Greek, Slavic, and Hungarian borrowings. Romanians are by far the most numerous group of speakers of a Balkan Romance language today. It has been said that they constitute "an island of Latinity" in Eastern Europe, surrounded on all sides either by Slavic peoples or by the Hungarians. The Hungarian minority in Romania constitutes the country's largest minority, 6.1 per cent of the population.
context_section_description: Slightly more than 10% of the population of Romania is formed of minorities of Romania. The principal minorities are Hungarians and Roma, although other smaller ethnic groups exist too. Before World War II, minorities represented more than 28% of the total population. During the war that percentage was halved, largely by the loss of the border areas of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina (to the former Soviet Union, now Moldova and Ukraine) and southern Dobrudja (to Bulgaria). Two-thirds of the ethnic German population either left or were deported after World War II, a period that was followed by decades of relatively regular (by communist standards) migration. During the interwar period in Romania, the total number of ethnic Germans amounted to as much as 786,000 (according to some sources and estimates dating to 1939), a figure which had subsequently fallen to circa 36,000 as of 2011 in contemporary Romania. One of the reasons for which the number of Germans in Romania fell is because after the Romanian Revolution there has been a mass migration of Transylvania Saxons to Germany, in what was referred by British daily newspaper Guardian to as 'the most astonishing, and little reported, ethnic migration in modern Europe'.
  Of a total official population of over three quarter million Jews before World War II, more than half were killed during the Holocaust. Mass emigration, mostly to Israel and United States, has reduced the surviving Jewish community to less than 6,000 in 2002 (it is estimated that the real numbers could be 3-4 times higher).
  Hungarians (Magyars; see Hungarians in Romania, especially in Harghita, Covasna, and Mureș counties) and Romani (Roma; see Romani people in Romania) are the principal minorities, with a declining German population (Banat Swabians in Timiș; Transylvanian Saxons in Sibiu, Brașov and elsewhere), and smaller numbers of Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, and Banat Bulgarians (in Banat), Ukrainians (especially in Maramureș and Bukovina), Greeks of Romania (especially in Brăila and Constanța), Turks and Tatars (mainly in Constanța), Armenians, Russians (Lipovans, Old Believers in Tulcea), Jews and others. Since the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Bucharest and other cities have again become increasingly cosmopolitan, including identifiable presences from outside the EU (Chinese, Turks, Moldovans, Syrians, Iraqis, Africans) as well as from the EU (French, Italians, Germans, British, Greeks). In Romania, there are also guest workers from countries such as Vietnam and Nepal.
  Minority populations are greatest in Transylvania and the Banat, areas in the north and west of the country, which were part of the Kingdom of Hungary (after 1867 the Austria-Hungary) until the end of World War I. Even before the union with Romania, ethnic Romanians comprised the overall majority in Transylvania. However, ethnic Hungarians and Germans were the dominant urban population until relatively recently, while Hungarians still constitute the majority in Harghita and Covasna counties.
  Romani people constitute one of Romania's largest minorities. According to the 2011 census, they number 621,573 people or 3.08% of the total population, being the second-largest ethnic minority in Romania after Hungarians, with significant populations in Mureș (8.9%) and Călărași (7,47%) counties. There are different estimates about the size of the total population of people with Romani ancestry in Romania because a lot of people of Romani descent do not declare themselves Romani. The number of Romani people is usually underestimated in official statistics and may represent 5–11% of Romania's population.
  After Hungarians and Romani, Ukrainians of Romania are the third-largest minority. According to the 2011 Romanian census they number 51,703 people, making up 0.3% of the total population. Ukrainians mainly live in northern Romania, in areas close to the Ukrainian border. Over 60% of all Romanian Ukrainians live in Maramureș County (where they make up 6.77% of the population).
caption: The Romani minority in Romania by county (2011 census)
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