 Romanian also spread to other countries on the Mediterranean (especially the other Romance-speaking countries, most notably Italy and Spain), and elsewhere such as Israel, where it is the native language of five percent of the population, and is spoken by many more as a secondary language.This is due to the large number of Romanian-born Jews who moved to Israel after World War II.And finally, some 2.6 million people in the former Soviet republic of Moldova speak a variety of Romanian, called variously Moldovan or Romanian by them.