There is a large quantity of Russian loan words in Evenki, especially for technologies and concepts that were introduced by the Russian pioneers in Siberia. "Evenki is spoken in regions with heavy multilingualism. In their daily life the people come into contact with Russian, Buriat and Yakut, and each of these languages had affected the Evenki language. Russian is the lingua franca of the region, part of the Evenki population is bilingual, and part trilingual. All Evenki know Russian relatively well." In 1998 there were approximately 30,000 ethnic Evenkis living in Russia and about 1/3 of them spoke the language. Even a decade ago Bulatova was trying to warn speakers and linguists alike: "There is widespread loss of Evenki and the language can be considered seriously endangered". According to the 2002 Russian census, there are 35,527 citizens of the Russian Federation who identify themselves as ethnically Evenki, but only 7,580 speakers of the language.