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Geographically, Siberia includes the Russian Urals, Siberian, and Far Eastern Federal Districts. The north-central parts of Kazakhstan are sometimes included in the region.
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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.
Population
Excluding territories of north-central Kazakhstan, Siberia has a total population of ca. 38.7 million (2005). The North Kazakhstan oblast has another 1.1 million inhabitants (2002).
About 70% of Siberia's people live in cities. 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 cities not usually considered part of Siberia, i.e. Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, and Nizhny Tagil.
Ethnicities and languages
The vast majority of the Siberian population (over 95%) is Slavic and other Indo-European ethnicities, mainly Russians, Ukrainians, and Germans. Most non-Slavic groups are Turkic. Smaller linguistic groups are Mongols (ca. 600,000 speakers) Uralic (Samoyedic, Ugric; roughly 100,000 speakers), Manchu-Tungus (ca. 40,000 speakers), Chukotko-Kamchatkan (ca. 25,000 speakers), Eskimo–Aleut (some 2,000 speakers), the Yukaghir languages (highly endangered), and languages isolates Ket (but see below) and Nivkh.
Mongolian, Turkic and Manchu-Tungus languages are sometimes taken together under the term Altaic. At one time Uralic and Altaic were believed to form the Ural–Altaic group, though this theory has now been largely discarded. The proposed Uralo-Siberian family combines the Uralic family with the Yukaghir languages, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, and Eskimo–Aleut. These are more umbrella terms than accepted linguistic relationships. Ket has recently been linked with the Na-Dene languages into a Dené–Yeniseian group; while not universally accepted a broad consensus in favor of the proposal has emerged.