Romania's population is 21,848,504 (july 2012). Like other countries in the region, its population is expected to gradually decline in the coming years. Romanians are 88.5% of the population, Hungarians 6.5% and Romani people 2.5%.
Hungarians constitute a majority in the counties of Harghita and Covasna. Ukrainians, Germans, Lipovans, Turks, Tatars, Serbs, Slovacks, Croats, Greeks, Bulgarians, Russian, Jews, Czech, Poles, Italians, Armenians, as well as other ethnic groups, account for the rest of the population.
As of 2009, there were also approximately 133,000 immigrants living in Romania, primarily from Moldova, and China.
After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, a significant number of Romanians emigrated to other European countries, North America or Asia, due to better working conditions and academic possibilities offered abroad.
The official language of Romania is Romanian, a Romance language related to Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese. Romanian is spoken as a first language by 91% of the population. Hungarian and Vlax Romani are the most important minority languages, spoken by 6.7% and 1.1% of the population, respectively. Until the early 1990s, there were also a substantial number of German-speaking Transylvanian Saxons, even though most have since emigrated to Germany, leaving only 45,000 native German speakers in Romania. There are approximately 32,000 Turkish speakers in Romania.
English and French are the main foreign languages taught in schools. English is spoken by 5-6 million Romanians, French is spoken by 4–5 million, and German, Italian and Spanish are each spoken by 1–2 million people.
An overwhelming majority of the country's citizens identify themselves as Christians. 86.7% of the country's population identified as Orthodox Christian. Other major Christian denominations include Protestantism (5.2%), Roman Catholicism (4.7%) and the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church (0.9%). The latter two religious organizations suffered most severely under the Communist regime. The Greek-Catholic Church was outlawed by the Communist government in 1948; later, under the Ceaușescu regime, several churches in Transylvania were demolished. Protestants and Roman Catholics are also concentrated in Transylvania.
The foundation of the oldest-known Romanian Orthodox church is still visible at Drobeta-Turnu Severin today, and dates from the 14th century; however, much earlier crypts with unearthed relics of Christian martyrs executed at the orders of the Roman emperor Diocletian were found in local church records dating as far back as the 3rd century AD.
Romania also has a Muslim minority concentrated in Dobruja, mostly of Turkish and Tatar ethnicity and numbering 67,500 people.
According to the 2002 census, there were 6,179 Jews, 23,105 people who are of no religion and/or atheist, and 11,734 who refused to answer. On 27 December 2006, a new Law on Religion was approved under which religious denominations can only receive official registration if they have at least 20,000 members, or about 0.1% of Romania's total population.
In the years following the Revolution has been a massive migration from village to city, but since 1996, the trend was reversed, and after 2005 was even stronger. Between 2005 and 2008, the number of people who have changed residence from rural to urban was 294,000, while the number of people who have changed residence from urban to rural was 418,000, difference being of over 120,000 people. Between 1996 and 2008, the difference was 313,000. According to statistics compiled in 2004, 11,895,600 citizens (54.88%) lived in the urban environment, and 9,777,728 citizens (45.12%) lived in the rural environment.
Bucharest is the capital and the largest city in Romania. At the census in 2011, its population was over 1.6 million.
Romania has four other cities that are among the European Union's 100 most populous: Cluj-Napoca, Timisoara, Iasi and Constanta. Other cities with populations over 200,000 are Craiova, Galati and Brasov. Another 11 cities have a population of over 100,000.
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