Russian language

Russian is an East Slavic language of the wider Indo-European family. It is a descendant of Old East Slavic, a language used in Kievan Rus', which was a loose conglomerate of East Slavic tribes from the late 9th to the mid-13th centuries. From the point of view of spoken language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn,^[34] the other three languages in the East Slavic branch. In many places in eastern and southern Ukraine and throughout Belarus, these languages are spoken interchangeably, and in certain areas traditional bilingualism resulted in language mixtures such as Surzhyk in eastern Ukraine and Trasianka in Belarus. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect, although it vanished during the 15th or 16th century, is sometimes considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. Also, Russian has notable lexical similarities with Bulgarian due to a common Church Slavonic influence on both languages, but because of later interaction in the 19th and 20th centuries, Bulgarian grammar differs markedly from Russian.^[35] In the 19th century (in Russia until 1917), the language was often called "Great Russian" to distinguish it from Belarusian, then called "White Russian" and Ukrainian, then called "Little Russian" in the Russian Empire.

The vocabulary (mainly abstract and literary words), principles of word formations, and, to some extent, inflections and literary style of Russian have been also influenced by Church Slavonic, a developed and partly Russified form of the South Slavic Old Church Slavonic language used by the Russian Orthodox Church. However, the East Slavic forms have tended to be used exclusively in the various dialects that are experiencing a rapid decline. In some cases, both the East Slavic and the Church Slavonic forms are in use, with many different meanings. For details, see Russian phonology and History of the Russian language.

Over the course of centuries, the vocabulary and literary style of Russian have also been influenced by Western and Central European languages such as Greek, Latin, Polish, Dutch, German, French, Italian, and English,^[36] and to a lesser extent the languages to the south and the east: Uralic, Turkic,^[37][38] Persian,^[39][40] Arabic, and Hebrew.^[41]

According to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, Russian is classified as a level III language in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers, requiring approximately 1,100 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency.^[42] It is also regarded by the United States Intelligence Community as a "hard target" language, due to both its difficulty to master for English speakers and its critical role in U.S. world policy.

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Indo-European languages

Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish, have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, of which there are eight groups with languages still alive today: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic; and another nine subdivisions that are now extinct.

Old East Slavic

Old East Slavic

Old East Slavic was a language used during the 5th–16th centuries by the East Slavs from which the Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn, and Ukrainian languages later evolved.

Kievan Rus'

Kievan Rus'

Kievan Rus', also known as Kyivan Rus', was a state and later an amalgam of principalities in Eastern and Northern Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century. Encompassing a variety of polities and peoples, including East Slavic, Norse, and Finnic, it was ruled by the Rurik dynasty, founded by the Varangian prince Rurik. The modern nations of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine all claim Kievan Rus' as their cultural ancestor, with Belarus and Russia deriving their names from it. At its greatest extent in the mid-11th century, Kievan Rus' stretched from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south and from the headwaters of the Vistula in the west to the Taman Peninsula in the east, uniting the East Slavic tribes.

East Slavs

East Slavs

The East Slavs are the most populous subgroup of the Slavs. They speak the East Slavic languages, and formed the majority of the population of the medieval state Kievan Rus', which they claim as their cultural ancestor. Today, the East Slavs consist of Belarusians, Russians, Rusyns, and Ukrainians.

Belarusian language

Belarusian language

Belarusian is an East Slavic language. It is the native language of the Belarusians and one of the two official state languages in Belarus, alongside Russian. Additionally, it is spoken in some parts of Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Ukraine by Belarusian minorities in those countries.

Rusyn language

Rusyn language

Rusyn, is an East Slavic language spoken by Rusyns in parts of Central and Eastern Europe, and written in the Cyrillic script. Within the community, the language is also referred to by the older folk term, руснацькый язык, rusnac'kyj jazyk, 'Rusnak language', or simply referred to as speaking our way. The majority of speakers live in an area known as Carpathian Ruthenia that spans from Transcarpathia, westward into eastern Slovakia and south-east Poland. There is also a sizeable Pannonian Rusyn linguistic island in Vojvodina, Serbia, as well as a Rusyn diaspora throughout the world. Per the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, Rusyn is officially recognized as a protected minority language by Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Serbia, and Slovakia.

Old Novgorod dialect

Old Novgorod dialect

Old Novgorod dialect is a term introduced by Andrey Zaliznyak to describe the dialect found in the Old East Slavic birch bark writings. Dating from the 11th to 15th centuries, the letters were excavated in Novgorod and its surroundings.

Bulgarian language

Bulgarian language

Bulgarian is an Eastern South Slavic language spoken in Southeast Europe, primarily in Bulgaria. It is the language of the Bulgarians.

Church Slavonic

Church Slavonic

Church Slavonic, also known as Church Slavic, New Church Slavonic or New Church Slavic, is the conservative Slavic liturgical language used by the Eastern Orthodox Church in Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Serbia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Slovenia and Croatia. The language appears also in the services of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese, and occasionally in the services of the Orthodox Church in America.

Great Russian language

Great Russian language

Great Russian language is a name given in the 19th century to the Russian language as opposed to the other two major East Slavic languages: Belarusian and Ukrainian. For instance, Vladimir Dal's monumental dictionary of the Russian language is titled Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language.

Old Church Slavonic

Old Church Slavonic

Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic was the first Slavic literary language.

Russian Orthodox Church

Russian Orthodox Church

The Russian Orthodox Church, alternatively legally known as the Moscow Patriarchate, is an autocephalous Eastern Orthodox Christian church. It has 194 dioceses inside Russia. The primate of the ROC is the Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus'.

Feudal divisions and conflicts between rival polities created obstacles to the exchange of goods and ideas between the early medieval Rus' principalities before and especially during Mongol rule. This strengthened dialectal differences and for centuries prevented the establishment of any standardized "national" language. The gradual but steady emergence of the Grand Principality of Moscow (1263–1547) – later the Tsardom of Russia from 1547 – as the dominant and ever-expanding polity of the Rus', necessitated the earliest attempts at standardization of the East Slavic language based on the Moscow dialect.^[43] Since then the trend of language policy in Russia has been standardization in both the restricted sense of reducing dialectical barriers between ethnic Russians, and the broader sense of expanding the use of Russian alongside or in favour of other languages that exist within the borders of the Russian Empire, and the later Soviet Union and recently, Russian Federation.^[43]

The current standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language (современный русский литературный язык – "sovremenny russky literaturny yazyk"). It arose at the beginning of the 18th century with the modernization reforms of the Russian state under the rule of Peter the Great and developed from the Moscow (Middle or Central Russian) dialect substratum under the influence of some of the previous century's Russian chancery language.^[43] This occurred in spite of the fact that Saint Petersburg, the Western-oriented capital created by the "Westernizing" Tsar Peter the Great, was the capital of the Russian Empire for over 200 years.

Mikhail Lomonosov compiled the first book of Russian grammar aimed at standardization in 1755. The Russian Academy's first explanatory Russian dictionary appeared in 1783. In the 18th and late 19th centuries, a period known as the "Golden Age" of Russian Literature, the grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation of the Russian language in a standardized literary form emerged.

Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, the spoken form of the Russian language was that of the nobility and the urban bourgeoisie. Russian peasants, the great majority of the population, continued to speak in their own dialects. However, the peasants' speech was never systematically studied, as it was generally regarded by philologists as simply a source of folklore and an object of curiosity.^[44] This was acknowledged by the noted Russian dialectologist Nikolai Karinsky (1873–1935), who toward the end of his life wrote: “Scholars of Russian dialects mostly studied phonetics and morphology. Some scholars and collectors compiled local dictionaries. We have almost no studies of lexical material or the syntax of Russian dialects.”^[45]

After 1917, Marxist linguists had no interest in the multiplicity of peasant dialects and regarded their language as a relic of the rapidly disappearing past that was not worthy of scholarly attention. Nakhimovsky quotes the Soviet academicians A.M Ivanov and L.P Yakubinsky, writing in 1930:

The language of peasants has a motley diversity inherited from feudalism. On its way to becoming proletariat peasantry brings to the factory and the industrial plant their local peasant dialects with their phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary, and the very process of recruiting workers from peasants and the mobility of the worker population generate another process: the liquidation of peasant inheritance by way of leveling the particulars of local dialects. On the ruins of peasant multilingual, in the context of developing heavy industry, a qualitatively new entity can be said to emerge—the general language of the working class... capitalism has the tendency of creating the general urban language of a given society.^[46]

By the mid-20th century, such dialects were forced out with the introduction of the compulsory education system that was established by the Soviet government. Despite the formalization of Standard Russian, some nonstandard dialectal features (such as fricative [ɣ] in Southern Russian dialects) are still observed in colloquial speech.

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Moscow dialect

Moscow dialect

The Moscow dialect or Moscow accent, sometimes Central Russian, is the spoken Russian language variety used in Moscow – one of the two major pronunciation norms of the Russian language alongside the Saint Petersburg norm. Influenced by both Northern and Southern Russian dialects, the Moscow dialect is the basis of the Russian literary language.

Rus' people

Rus' people

The Rus' were a people in early medieval eastern Europe. The scholarly consensus holds that they were originally Norsemen, mainly originating from present-day Sweden, who settled and ruled along the river-routes between the Baltic and the Black Seas from around the 8th to 11th centuries AD. In the 9th century, they formed the state of Kievan Rusʹ, where the ruling Norsemen along with local Finnic tribes gradually assimilated into the East Slavic population, with Old East Slavic becoming the common spoken language. Old Norse remained familiar to the elite until their complete assimilation by the second half of the 11th century, and in rural areas, vestiges of Norse culture persisted as late as the 14th and early 15th centuries, particularly in the north.

Tsardom of Russia

Tsardom of Russia

The Tsardom of Russia or Tsardom of Rus', also known as the Tsardom of Muscovy, was the centralized Russian state from the assumption of the title of tsar by Ivan IV in 1547 until the foundation of the Russian Empire by Peter I in 1721.

Russian Empire

Russian Empire

The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended the Great Northern War. The rise of the Russian Empire coincided with the decline of neighbouring rival powers: the Swedish Empire, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Qajar Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and Qing China. It also held colonies in North America between 1799 and 1867. Covering an area of approximately 22,800,000 square kilometres (8,800,000 sq mi), it remains the third-largest empire in history, surpassed only by the British Empire and the Mongol Empire; it ruled over a population of 125.6 million people per the 1897 Russian census, the only census carried out during the entire imperial period. Owing to its geographic extent across three continents at its peak, it featured great ethnic, linguistic, religious, and economic diversity.

Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was a transcontinental country spanning most of northern Eurasia that existed from 30 December 1922 to 26 December 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national republics; in practice, both its government and its economy were highly centralized until its final years. It was a one-party state governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with the city of Moscow serving as its capital as well as that of its largest and most populous republic: the Russian SFSR. Other major cities included Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, Tashkent, Alma-Ata, and Novosibirsk. It was the largest country in the world, covering over 22,402,200 square kilometres (8,649,500 sq mi) and spanning eleven time zones.

Peter the Great

Peter the Great

Peter I, most commonly known as Peter the Great, was a Russian monarch who ruled the Tsardom of Russia from 7 May [O.S. 27 April] 1682 to 1721 and subsequently the Russian Empire until his death in 1725, jointly ruling with his elder half-brother, Ivan V until 1696. He is primarily credited with the modernisation of the country, transforming it into a European power.

Central Russian dialects

Central Russian dialects

Central or Middle Russian dialects is one of the main groups of the Russian dialects. Of Northern Russian origin, it has nonetheless assumed many Southern Russian features.

Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd (1914–1924) and later Leningrad (1924–1991), is the second-largest city in Russia. It is situated on the Neva River, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city had a population of roughly 5.4 million residents as of 2020. Saint Petersburg is the fourth-most populous city in Europe, the most populous city on the Baltic Sea, and the world's northernmost city of more than 1 million residents. As Russia's Imperial capital, and a historically strategic port, it is governed as a federal city.

Westernization

Westernization

Westernization, also Europeanisation or occidentalization, is a process whereby societies come under or adopt Western culture in areas such as industry, technology, science, education, politics, economics, lifestyle, law, norms, mores, customs, traditions, values, mentality, perceptions, diet, clothing, language, writing system, religion, and philosophy. During colonialism it often involved the spread of Christianity.

Mikhail Lomonosov

Mikhail Lomonosov

Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov was a Russian polymath, scientist and writer, who made important contributions to literature, education, and science. Among his discoveries were the atmosphere of Venus and the law of conservation of mass in chemical reactions. His spheres of science were natural science, chemistry, physics, mineralogy, history, art, philology, optical devices and others. The founder of modern geology, Lomonosov was also a poet and influenced the formation of the modern Russian literary language.

Russian grammar

Russian grammar

Russian grammar employs an Indo-European inflexional structure, with considerable adaptation.

Russian Academy

Russian Academy

The Russian Academy or Imperial Russian Academy was established in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1783 by Empress Catherine II of Russia and princess Dashkova as a research center for Russian language and Russian literature, following the example of the Académie française. In 1841 it was merged into the Imperial Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences.

Hemisphere view of countries where Russian is an official language and countries where it is spoken as a first or second language by at least 30% of the population but is not an official language

Competence of Russian in countries of the former Soviet Union (except Russia), 2004

In 2010, there were 259.8 million speakers of Russian in the world: in Russia – 137.5 million, in the CIS and Baltic countries – 93.7 million, in Eastern Europe – 12.9 million, Western Europe – 7.3 million, Asia – 2.7 million, in the Middle East and North Africa – 1.3 million, Sub-Saharan Africa – 0.1 million, Latin America – 0.2 million, U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – 4.1 million speakers. Therefore, the Russian language is the seventh-largest in the world by the number of speakers, after English, Mandarin, Hindi-Urdu, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Portuguese.^[47][48][49]

Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Education in Russian is still a popular choice for both Russian as a second language (RSL) and native speakers in Russia, and in many former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics.^[50]

Europe

Percentage of people in Ukraine with Russian as their native language (according to a 2001 census) (by region)

In Belarus, Russian is a second state language alongside Belarusian per the Constitution of Belarus.^[51] 77% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 67% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work.^[52]

In Estonia, Russian is spoken by 29.6% of the population according to a 2011 estimate from the World Factbook,^[53] and is officially considered a foreign language.^[51] School education in the Russian language is a very contentious point in Estonian politics and as of 2022 the parliament has approved to close up all Russian language schools and kindergartens by the school year . The transition to only Estonian language schools/kindergartens will start in the school year . ^[54]

In Latvia, Russian is officially considered a foreign language.^[51] 55% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 26% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work.^[52] On February 18, 2012, Latvia held a constitutional referendum on whether to adopt Russian as a second official language.^[55] According to the Central Election Commission, 74.8% voted against, 24.9% voted for and the voter turnout was 71.1%.^[56] Starting in 2019, instruction in Russian will be gradually discontinued in private colleges and universities in Latvia, and in general instruction in Latvian public high schools.^[57][58]

In Lithuania, Russian has no official or legal status, but the use of the language has some presence in certain areas. A large part of the population, especially the older generations, can speak Russian as a foreign language.^[59] However, English has replaced Russian as lingua franca in Lithuania and around 80% of young people speak English as their first foreign language.^[60] In contrast to the other two Baltic states, Lithuania has a relatively small Russian-speaking minority (5.0% as of 2008).^[61]

In Moldova, Russian is considered to be the language of inter-ethnic communication under a Soviet-era law.^[51] 50% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 19% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work.^[52]

According to the 2010 census in Russia, Russian language skills were indicated by 138 million people (99.4% of the respondents), while according to the 2002 census – 142.6 million people (99.2% of the respondents).^[62]

In Ukraine, Russian is a significant minority language. According to estimates from Demoskop Weekly, in 2004 there were 14,400,000 native speakers of Russian in the country, and 29 million active speakers.^[63] 65% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 38% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work.^[52] On September 5, 2017, Ukraine's Parliament passed a new education law which requires all schools to teach at least partially in Ukrainian, with provisions while allow indigenous languages and languages of national minorities to be used alongside the national language.^[64] The law faced criticism from officials in Russia and Hungary.^[65][66]

In the 20th century, Russian was a mandatory language taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other countries that used to be satellites of the USSR. According to the Eurobarometer 2005 survey,^[67] fluency in Russian remains fairly high (20–40%) in some countries, in particular those where the people speak a Slavic language and thereby have an edge in learning Russian (namely, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Bulgaria).

Significant Russian-speaking groups also exist in Western Europe. These have been fed by several waves of immigrants since the beginning of the 20th century, each with its own flavor of language. The United Kingdom, Germany, Finland, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Norway, and Austria have significant Russian-speaking communities.

Asia

In Armenia, Russian has no official status, but it is recognized as a minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities.^[51] 30% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 2% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work.^[52]

In Azerbaijan, Russian has no official status, but is a lingua franca of the country.^[51] 26% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 5% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work.^[52]

In China, Russian has no official status, but it is spoken by the small Russian communities in the northeastern Heilongjiang and the northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

In Georgia, Russian has no official status, but it is recognized as a minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities.^[51] Russian is the language of 9% of the population according to the World Factbook.^[68] Ethnologue cites Russian as the country's de facto working language.^[69]

In Kazakhstan, Russian is not a state language, but according to article 7 of the Constitution of Kazakhstan its usage enjoys equal status to that of the Kazakh language in state and local administration.^[51] The 2009 census reported that 10,309,500 people, or 84.8% of the population aged 15 and above, could read and write well in Russian, and understand the spoken language.^[70]

In Kyrgyzstan, Russian is a co-official language per article 5 of the Constitution of Kyrgyzstan.^[51] The 2009 census states that 482,200 people speak Russian as a native language, or 8.99% of the population.^[71] Additionally, 1,854,700 residents of Kyrgyzstan aged 15 and above fluently speak Russian as a second language, or 49.6% of the population in the age group.^[71]

In Tajikistan, Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication under the Constitution of Tajikistan and is permitted in official documentation.^[51] 28% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 7% used it as the main language with family, friends or at work.^[52] The World Factbook notes that Russian is widely used in government and business.^[53]

In Turkmenistan, Russian lost its status as the official lingua franca in 1996.^[51] Among 12%^[53] of the population who grew up in the Soviet era can speak Russian, other generations of citizens that do not have any knowledge of Russian. Primary and secondary education by Russian is almost non-existent.^[72] Nevertheless, the Turkmen state press and newspaper Neytralny Turkmenistan regularly publish material version in Russian-language, and there are schools like Joint Turkmen-Russian Secondary School.

In Uzbekistan, Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication.^[7][8][9] It has some official roles, being permitted in official documentation and is the lingua franca of the country and the language of the elite.^[51][73] Russian is spoken by 14.2% of the population according to an undated estimate from the World Factbook.^[53]

In 2005, Russian was the most widely taught foreign language in Mongolia,^[74] and was compulsory in Year 7 onward as a second foreign language in 2006.^[20]

Around 1.5 million Israelis spoke Russian as of 2017.^[75] The Israeli press and websites regularly publish material in Russian and there are Russian newspapers, television stations, schools, and social media outlets based in the country.^[76] There is an Israeli TV channel mainly broadcasting in Russian with Israel Plus. See also Russian language in Israel.

Russian is also spoken as a second language by a small number of people in Afghanistan.^[77]

In Vietnam, Russian has been added in the elementary curriculum along with Chinese and Japanese and were named as "first foreign languages" for Vietnamese students to learn, on equal footing with English.^[78]

North America

The Russian language was first introduced in North America when Russian explorers voyaged into Alaska and claimed it for Russia during the 18th century. Although most Russian colonists left after the United States bought the land in 1867, a handful stayed and preserved the Russian language in this region to this day, although only a few elderly speakers of this unique dialect are left.^[79] In Nikolaevsk, Alaska, Russian is more spoken than English. Sizable Russian-speaking communities also exist in North America, especially in large urban centers of the US and Canada, such as New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, Nashville, San Francisco, Seattle, Spokane, Toronto, Calgary, Baltimore, Miami, Chicago, Denver, and Cleveland. In a number of locations they issue their own newspapers, and live in ethnic enclaves (especially the generation of immigrants who started arriving in the early 1960s). Only about 25% of them are ethnic Russians, however. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the overwhelming majority of Russophones in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in New York City were Russian-speaking Jews. Afterward, the influx from the countries of the former Soviet Union changed the statistics somewhat, with ethnic Russians and Ukrainians immigrating along with some more Russian Jews and Central Asians. According to the United States Census, in 2007 Russian was the primary language spoken in the homes of over 850,000 individuals living in the United States.^[80]

In the second half of the 20th century, Russian was the most popular foreign language in Cuba. Besides being taught at universities and schools, there were also educational programs on the radio and TV. An estimated 200,000 people speak the Russian language in Cuba, on the account that more than 23,000 Cubans who took higher studies in the former Soviet Union and later in Russia, and another important group of people who studied at military schools and technologists.

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Geographical distribution of Russian speakers

Geographical distribution of Russian speakers

This article details the geographical distribution of Russian-speakers. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the status of the Russian language often became a matter of controversy. Some Post-Soviet states adopted policies of derussification aimed at reversing former trends of Russification, while Belarus under Lukashenko and the Russian Federation under Putin reintroduced Russification policies in the 1990s and 2000s, respectively.

Commonwealth of Independent States

Commonwealth of Independent States

The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) is a regional intergovernmental organization in Eurasia. It was formed following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It covers an area of 20,368,759 km2 (7,864,422 sq mi) and has an estimated population of 239,796,010. The CIS encourages cooperation in economic, political and military affairs and has certain powers relating to the coordination of trade, finance, lawmaking, and security. It has also promoted cooperation on cross-border crime prevention.

Official languages of the United Nations

Official languages of the United Nations

The official languages of the United Nations are the six languages that are used in UN meetings and in which all official UN documents are written. In the six languages, four are the official language or national language of permanent members in the Security Council, while the remaining two are used due to the large number of their speakers. In alphabetical order of the Latin alphabet, they are:Arabic – official or national language of several countries in the Middle East and North Africa, and used in the Arab world. Chinese – official language of the People's Republic of China. English – majority and de facto official language of the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, and majority official language of Canada and New Zealand. It is also the most popular language, the most popular lingua franca, and a majority and/or official language in several other countries and territories. French – official language of France. It is also official in Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, and several countries in Africa. Russian – official language of the Russian Federation. It is also used in several post-Soviet states. Spanish – official or national language in 18 countries and one territory in the Americas, Spain, and Equatorial Guinea.

Administrative divisions of Ukraine

Administrative divisions of Ukraine

The administrative divisions of Ukraine are subnational administrative divisions within the geographical area of Ukraine under the jurisdiction of the Ukrainian Constitution. Ukraine is a unitary state with 3 levels of administrative divisions: 27 regions, 136 raions and 1469 hromadas.

Constitution of Belarus

Constitution of Belarus

The Constitution of the Republic of Belarus is the ultimate law of Belarus. The Constitution is composed of a preamble and nine sections divided into 146 articles.

2012 Latvian constitutional referendum

2012 Latvian constitutional referendum

A constitutional referendum on the "Amendments to the Constitution of the Republic of Latvia" was held on 18 February 2012. Proposed amendments included Articles 4, 18, 21, 101 and 104 of the Constitution of Latvia by adding the condition about Russian as the second official language, as well as prescribing two working languages — Latvian and Russian — for self-government institutions. The referendum's question was "Do you support the adoption of the Draft Law "Amendments to the Constitution of the Republic of Latvia" that provides for the Russian language the status of the second official language?".

Lingua franca

Lingua franca

A lingua franca, also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups of people who do not share a native language or dialect, particularly when it is a third language that is distinct from both of the speakers' native languages.

Russian Census (2010)

Russian Census (2010)

The Russian Census of 2010 was the second census of the Russian Federation population after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Preparations for the census began in 2007 and it took place between October 14 and October 25.

Russian Census (2002)

Russian Census (2002)

The Russian Census of 2002 was the first census of the Russian Federation since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, carried out on October 9 through October 16, 2002. It was carried out by the Russian Federal Service of State Statistics (Rosstat).

Communist state

Communist state

A communist state, also known as a Marxist–Leninist state, is a one-party state that is administered and governed by a communist party guided by Marxism–Leninism. Marxism–Leninism was the state ideology of the Soviet Union, the Comintern after Bolshevisation and the communist states within the Comecon, the Eastern Bloc, and the Warsaw Pact. Marxism–Leninism currently still remains the ideology of a few parties around the world. After its peak when many communist states were established, the Revolutions of 1989 brought down most of the communist states, however, it is still the official ideology of the ruling parties of China, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. During most of the 20th century, before the Revolutions of 1989, around one-third of the world's population lived under communist states.

Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities

Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities

The Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (FCNM) is a multilateral treaty of the Council of Europe aimed at protecting the rights of minorities. It came into effect in 1998 and by 2009 it had been ratified by 39 member states.

Heilongjiang

Heilongjiang

Heilongjiang formerly romanized as Heilungkiang, is a province in northeast China. The standard one-character abbreviation for the province is 黑. It is the northernmost and easternmost province of the country and contains China's northernmost point and easternmost point.

Russian is one of the official languages (or has similar status and interpretation must be provided into Russian) of the following:

The Russian language is also one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station – NASA astronauts who serve alongside Russian cosmonauts usually take Russian language courses. This practice goes back to the Apollo–Soyuz mission, which first flew in 1975.

In March 2013, Russian was found to be the second-most used language on websites after English. Russian was the language of 5.9% of all websites, slightly ahead of German and far behind English (54.7%). Russian was used not only on 89.8% of .ru sites, but also on 88.7% of sites with the former Soviet Union domain .su. Websites in former Soviet Union member states also used high levels of Russian: 79.0% in Ukraine, 86.9% in Belarus, 84.0% in Kazakhstan, 79.6% in Uzbekistan, 75.9% in Kyrgyzstan and 81.8% in Tajikistan. However, Russian was the sixth-most used language on the top 1,000 sites, behind English, Chinese, French, German, and Japanese.^[81]

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List of official languages by institution

List of official languages by institution

This is a list of official languages for major international and regional institutions. Different organizations sometimes refer to their principal languages of administration and communication as "working languages", while others refer to these as being "official". No distinction is made here, except where an organization itself, distinguishes between its official and working languages.

Internet in Russian

Internet in Russian

Internet in Russian is a part of the Internet that uses the Russian language. Geographically, it reaches all continents, including Antarctica, but mostly it is based in Russia.

International Atomic Energy Agency

International Atomic Energy Agency

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is an intergovernmental organization that seeks to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy and to inhibit its use for any military purpose, including nuclear weapons. It was established in 1957 as an autonomous organization within the United Nations system; though governed by its own founding treaty, the organization reports to both the General Assembly and the Security Council of the United Nations, and is headquartered at the UN Office at Vienna, Austria.

International Civil Aviation Organization

International Civil Aviation Organization

The International Civil Aviation Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations that coordinates the principles and techniques of international air navigation, and fosters the planning and development of international air transport to ensure safe and orderly growth. ICAO headquarters are located in the Quartier International of Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

International Telecommunication Union

International Telecommunication Union

The International Telecommunication Union is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for many matters related to information and communication technologies. It was established on 17 May 1865 as the International Telegraph Union, making it the first international organization. Doreen Bogdan-Martin is the Secretary-General of ITU, the first woman to serve as its head.

Food and Agriculture Organization

Food and Agriculture Organization

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is an international organization that leads international efforts to defeat hunger and improve nutrition and food security. Its Latin motto, fiat panis, translates to "let there be bread." It was founded on 16 October 1945.

International Fund for Agricultural Development

International Fund for Agricultural Development

The International Fund for Agricultural Development is an international financial institution and a specialised agency of the United Nations that works to address poverty and hunger in rural areas of developing countries. It is the only multilateral development organization that focuses solely on rural economies and food security.

International Criminal Court

International Criminal Court

The International Criminal Court is an intergovernmental organization and international tribunal seated in The Hague, Netherlands. It is the first and only permanent international court with jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for the international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression.

International Olympic Committee

International Olympic Committee

The International Olympic Committee is a non-governmental sports organisation based in Lausanne, Switzerland. It is constituted in the form of an association under the Swiss Civil Code. Founded in 1894 by Pierre de Coubertin and Demetrios Vikelas, it is the authority responsible for organising the modern Olympic Games.

Commonwealth of Independent States

Commonwealth of Independent States

The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) is a regional intergovernmental organization in Eurasia. It was formed following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It covers an area of 20,368,759 km2 (7,864,422 sq mi) and has an estimated population of 239,796,010. The CIS encourages cooperation in economic, political and military affairs and has certain powers relating to the coordination of trade, finance, lawmaking, and security. It has also promoted cooperation on cross-border crime prevention.

Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe

Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) is the world's largest regional security-oriented intergovernmental organization with observer status at the United Nations. Its mandate includes issues such as arms control, promotion of human rights, freedom of the press, and free and fair elections. It employs around 3,460 people, mostly in its field operations but also in its secretariat in Vienna, Austria, and its institutions.

Shanghai Cooperation Organisation

Shanghai Cooperation Organisation

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) is a Eurasian political, economic, International security and defence organization. It is the world's largest regional organization in terms of geographic scope and population, covering approximately 60% of the area of Eurasia, 40% of the world population, and more than 30% of global GDP.

Russian dialects in 1915

Northern dialects   1. Arkhangelsk dialect   2. Olonets dialect   3. Novgorod dialect   4. Viatka dialect   5. Vladimir dialect

Central dialects   6. Moscow dialect   7. Tver dialect Southern dialects   8. Orel (Don) dialect   9. Ryazan dialect   10. Tula dialect   11. Smolensk dialect Other   12. Northern Russian dialect with Belarusian influences   13. Sloboda and Steppe dialects of Ukrainian   14. Steppe dialect of Ukrainian with Russian influences

Russian is a rather homogeneous language, in dialectal variation, due to the early political centralization under Moscow's rule, compulsory education, mass migration from rural to urban areas in the 20th century, and other factors. The standard language is used in written and spoken form almost everywhere in the country, from Kaliningrad and Saint Petersburg in the West to Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky in the East, the enormous distance between notwithstanding.

Despite leveling after 1900, especially in matters of vocabulary and phonetics, a number of dialects still exist in Russia. Some linguists divide the dialects of Russian into two primary regional groupings, "Northern" and "Southern", with Moscow lying on the zone of transition between the two. Others divide the language into three groupings, Northern, Central (or Middle), and Southern, with Moscow lying in the Central region.^[82][83] All dialects are also divided into two main chronological categories: the dialects of primary formation (the territory of the Grand Duchy of Moscow roughly consists of the modern Central and Northwestern Federal districts) and secondary formation (other territories where Russian was brought by migrants from primary formation territories or adopted by the local population). Dialectology within Russia recognizes dozens of smaller-scale variants. The dialects often show distinct and non-standard features of pronunciation and intonation, vocabulary, and grammar. Some of these are relics of ancient usage now completely discarded by the standard language.

The Northern Russian dialects and those spoken along the Volga River typically pronounce unstressed /o/ clearly, a phenomenon called okanye (оканье).^[83] Besides the absence of vowel reduction, some dialects have high or diphthongal /e⁓i̯ɛ/ in place of Proto-Slavic *ě and /o⁓u̯ɔ/ in stressed closed syllables (as in Ukrainian) instead of Standard Russian /e/ and /o/.^[83] Another Northern dialectal morphological feature is a post-posed definite article -to, -ta, -te similarly to that existing in Bulgarian and Macedonian.^[83]

In the Southern Russian dialects, instances of unstressed /e/ and /a/ following palatalized consonants and preceding a stressed syllable are not reduced to [ɪ] (as occurs in the Moscow dialect), being instead pronounced [a] in such positions (e.g. несли is pronounced [nʲaˈslʲi], not [nʲɪsˈlʲi]) – this is called yakanye (яканье).^[83][84] Consonants include a fricative /ɣ/, a semivowel /w⁓u̯/ and /x⁓xv⁓xw/, whereas the Standard and Northern dialects have the consonants /ɡ/, /v/, and final /l/ and /f/, respectively.^[83] The morphology features a palatalized final /tʲ/ in 3rd person forms of verbs (this is unpalatalized in the Standard and Northern dialects).^[83][85] Some of these features such as akanye and yakanye, a debuccalized or lenited /ɡ/, a semivowel /w⁓u̯/ and palatalized final /tʲ/ in 3rd person forms of verbs are also present in modern Belarusian and some dialects of Ukrainian (Eastern Polesian), indicating a linguistic continuum.

The city of Veliky Novgorod has historically displayed a feature called chokanye or tsokanye (чоканье or цоканье), in which /tɕ/ and /ts/ were switched or merged. So, цапля (tsaplya, 'heron') has been recorded as чапля (chaplya). Also, the second palatalization of velars did not occur there, so the so-called ě² (from the Proto-Slavic diphthong *ai) did not cause /k, ɡ, x/ to shift to /ts, dz, s/; therefore, where Standard Russian has цепь ('chain'), the form кепь [kʲepʲ] is attested in earlier texts.

Among the first to study Russian dialects was Lomonosov in the 18th century. In the 19th, Vladimir Dal compiled the first dictionary that included dialectal vocabulary. Detailed mapping of Russian dialects began at the turn of the 20th century. In modern times, the monumental Dialectological Atlas of the Russian Language (Диалектологический атлас русского языка – Dialektologichesky atlas russkogo yazyka), was published in three folio volumes 1986–1989, after four decades of preparatory work.

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Russian dialects

Russian dialects

Russian dialects are spoken variants of the Russian language.

Moscow dialect

Moscow dialect

The Moscow dialect or Moscow accent, sometimes Central Russian, is the spoken Russian language variety used in Moscow – one of the two major pronunciation norms of the Russian language alongside the Saint Petersburg norm. Influenced by both Northern and Southern Russian dialects, the Moscow dialect is the basis of the Russian literary language.

Arkhangelsk

Arkhangelsk

Arkhangelsk, also known in English as Archangel and Archangelsk, is a city and the administrative center of Arkhangelsk Oblast, Russia. It lies on both banks of the Northern Dvina near its mouth into the White Sea. The city spreads for over 40 kilometres (25 mi) along the banks of the river and numerous islands of its delta. Arkhangelsk was the chief seaport of medieval and early modern Russia until 1703, when it was replaced by the newly-founded Saint Petersburg.

Olonets

Olonets

Olonets is a town and the administrative center of Olonetsky District of the Republic of Karelia, Russia, located on the Olonka River to the east of Lake Ladoga. Population: 9,056 (2010 Census); 10,240 (2002 Census); 11,888 (1989 Census).

Kirov, Kirov Oblast

Kirov, Kirov Oblast

Kirov is the largest city and administrative center of Kirov Oblast, Russia. It is located on the Vyatka River in European Russia, 896 km northeast of Moscow. Its population was 518,348 in 2020. Kirov is a historical, cultural, industrial, and scientific center of Priural'e ; place of origin for Dymkovo toys; the most eastern city founded during the times of Kievan Rus'.

Oryol

Oryol

Oryol, also transliterated as Orel or Oriol, is a city and the administrative center of Oryol Oblast, Russia, situated on the Oka River, approximately 368 kilometers (229 mi) south-southwest of Moscow. It is part of the Central Federal District, as well as the Central Economic Region.

Ryazan

Ryazan

Ryazan is the largest city and administrative center of Ryazan Oblast, Russia. The city is located on the banks of the Oka River in Central Russia, 196 km (122 mi) southeast of Moscow. As of the 2010 Census, Ryazan had a population of 524,927, making it the 33rd most populated city in Russia, and the fourth most populated in Central Russia after Moscow, Voronezh, and Yaroslavl.

Smolensk

Smolensk

Smolensk is a city and the administrative center of Smolensk Oblast, Russia, located on the Dnieper River, 360 kilometers (220 mi) west-southwest of Moscow. First mentioned in 863, it is one of the oldest cities in Russia.

Belarusian language

Belarusian language

Belarusian is an East Slavic language. It is the native language of the Belarusians and one of the two official state languages in Belarus, alongside Russian. Additionally, it is spoken in some parts of Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Ukraine by Belarusian minorities in those countries.

Kaliningrad

Kaliningrad

Kaliningrad, until 1946 known as Königsberg, is the largest city and administrative centre of Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian semi-exclave between Lithuania and Poland. The city sits about 663 kilometres (412 mi) west from mainland Russia. The city is situated on the Pregolya River, at the head of the Vistula Lagoon on the Baltic Sea, and is the only ice-free port of Russia and the Baltic states on the Baltic Sea. Its population in 2020 was 489,359, with up to 800,000 residents in the urban agglomeration. Kaliningrad is the second-largest city in the Northwestern Federal District, after Saint Petersburg, the third-largest city in the Baltic region, and the seventh-largest city on the Baltic Sea.

Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd (1914–1924) and later Leningrad (1924–1991), is the second-largest city in Russia. It is situated on the Neva River, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city had a population of roughly 5.4 million residents as of 2020. Saint Petersburg is the fourth-most populous city in Europe, the most populous city on the Baltic Sea, and the world's northernmost city of more than 1 million residents. As Russia's Imperial capital, and a historically strategic port, it is governed as a federal city.

Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky

Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky

Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is a city and the administrative, industrial, scientific, and cultural center of Kamchatka Krai, Russia. As of the 2021 Census its population is 164,900.

During the Proto-Slavic (Common Slavic) times all Slavs spoke one mutually intelligible language or group of dialects.^[86] There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian, and a moderate degree of it in all modern Slavic languages, at least at the conversational level.^[87][88]

Discover more about Comparison with other Slavic languages related topics

Proto-Slavic language

Proto-Slavic language

Proto-Slavic is the unattested, reconstructed proto-language of all Slavic languages. It represents Slavic speech approximately from the 2nd millennium B.C. through the 6th century A.D. As with most other proto-languages, no attested writings have been found; scholars have reconstructed the language by applying the comparative method to all the attested Slavic languages and by taking into account other Indo-European languages.

Mutual intelligibility

Mutual intelligibility

In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is used as an important criterion for distinguishing languages from dialects, although sociolinguistic factors are often also used.

Belarusian language

Belarusian language

Belarusian is an East Slavic language. It is the native language of the Belarusians and one of the two official state languages in Belarus, alongside Russian. Additionally, it is spoken in some parts of Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Ukraine by Belarusian minorities in those countries.

Ukrainian language

Ukrainian language

Ukrainian is an East Slavic language of the Indo-European language family, spoken primarily in Ukraine. It is the native language of the Ukrainians.

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• Balachka, a dialect spoken in Krasnodar region, Don, Kuban, and Terek, brought by relocated Cossacks in 1793 and is based on the southwest Ukrainian dialect. During the Russification of the aforementioned regions in the 1920s to 1950s, it was replaced by the Russian language.
• Esperanto has some words of Russian and Slavic origin and some features of its grammar could be derived from Russian.^[89]
• Fenya, a criminal argot of ancient origin, with Russian grammar, but with distinct vocabulary
• Lojban, Russian is one of its six source languages, weighed for the number of Russian speakers in 1985.^[90]
• Medny Aleut language, an extinct mixed language that was spoken on Bering Island and is characterized by its Aleut nouns and Russian verbs
• Padonkaffsky jargon, a slang language developed by padonki of Runet
• Quelia, a macaronic language with Russian-derived basic structure and part of the lexicon (mainly nouns and verbs) borrowed from German
• Runglish, a Russian-English pidgin. This word is also used by English speakers to describe the way in which Russians attempt to speak English using Russian morphology and/or syntax.
• Russenorsk, an extinct pidgin language with mostly Russian vocabulary and mostly Norwegian grammar, used for communication between Russians and Norwegian traders in the Pomor trade in Finnmark and the Kola Peninsula
• Surzhyk, a range of mixed (macaronic) sociolects of Ukrainian and Russian languages used in certain regions of Ukraine and adjacent lands.
• Trasianka, a heavily russified variety of Belarusian used by a large portion of the rural population in Belarus
• Taimyr Pidgin Russian, spoken by the Nganasan on the Taimyr Peninsula

Discover more about Derived languages related topics

Balachka

Balachka

Baláchka is a Ukrainian dialect spoken in the Kuban and Don regions, where Ukrainian settlers used to live. It was strongly influenced by Cossack culture.

Kuban

Kuban

Kuban is a historical and geographical region in the North Caucasus region in southern Russia surrounding the Kuban River, on the Black Sea between the Don Steppe, the Volga Delta and separated from the Crimean Peninsula to the west by the Kerch Strait. Krasnodar Krai is often referred to as Kuban, both officially and unofficially, although the term is not exclusive to the krai and also accommodates the republics of Adygea, Karachay-Cherkessia, and parts of Stavropol Krai.

Cossacks

Cossacks

The Cossacks are a predominantly East Slavic Orthodox Christian people originating in the Pontic–Caspian steppe of Ukraine and southern Russia. Historically, they were a semi-nomadic and semi-militarized people, who, while under the nominal suzerainty of various Eastern European states at the time, were allowed a great degree of self-governance in exchange for military service. Although numerous linguistic and religious groups came together to form the Cossacks, most of them coalesced and became East Slavic-speaking Orthodox Christians. The Cossacks were particularly noted for holding democratic traditions. The rulers of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russian Empire endowed Cossacks with certain special privileges in return for the military duty to serve in the irregular troops. The various Cossack groups were organized along military lines, with large autonomous groups called hosts. Each host had a territory consisting of affiliated villages called stanitsa.

Esperanto etymology

Esperanto etymology

Esperanto vocabulary and grammatical forms derive primarily from the Romance languages, with substantial contributions from Germanic languages. The language occupies a middle ground between "naturalistic" constructed languages such as Interlingua, which borrow words en masse from their source languages with little internal derivation, and a priori conlangs such as Solresol, in which the words have no historical connection to other languages. In Esperanto, root words are borrowed and retain much of the form of their source language, whether the phonetic form (eks- from international ex-, vualo from French voile) or orthographic form (teamo and boato from English team and boat, soifo from French soif). However, each root can then form dozens of derivations which may bear little resemblance to equivalent words in the source languages, such as registaro (government), which is derived from the Latinate root reg but has a morphology closer to German or Russian.

Fenya

Fenya

Fenya or fen'ka is a Russian cant language used among criminals. In modern Russian language it is also referred to as blatnoy language, where "blatnoy" is a slang expression for "professional criminal". It is also widely used in "thieves' songs".

Lojban

Lojban

Lojban is a logical, constructed, human language created by the Logical Language Group which aims to be syntactically unambiguous. It succeeds the Loglan project.

Mixed language

Mixed language

A mixed language is a language that arises among a bilingual group combining aspects of two or more languages but not clearly deriving primarily from any single language. It differs from a creole or pidgin language in that, whereas creoles/pidgins arise where speakers of many languages acquire a common language, a mixed language typically arises in a population that is fluent in both of the source languages.

Bering Island

Bering Island

Bering Island is located off the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Bering Sea.

Aleut

Aleut

The Aleuts are the indigenous people of the Aleutian Islands, which are located between the North Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea. Both the Aleut people and the islands are politically divided between the US state of Alaska and the Russian administrative division of Kamchatka Krai.

Padonkaffsky jargon

Padonkaffsky jargon

Padonkaffsky jargon or Olbanian is a cant language developed by a subculture of Runet called padonki. It started as an Internet slang language originally used in the Russian Internet community. It is comparable to the English-based Leet. Padonkaffsky jargon became so popular that the former President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev jokingly suggested that Olbanian be taught in schools.

Macaronic language

Macaronic language

Macaronic language uses a mixture of languages, particularly bilingual puns or situations in which the languages are otherwise used in the same context. Hybrid words are effectively "internally macaronic." In spoken language, code-switching is using more than one language or dialect within the same conversation.

Lexicon

Lexicon

A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge. In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word lexicon derives from Greek word λεξικόν, neuter of λεξικός meaning 'of or for words'.

A page from Azbuka (Alphabet book), the first East Slavic printed textbook. Printed by Ivan Fyodorov in 1574 in Lviv. This page features the Cyrillic script.

Russian is written using a Cyrillic alphabet. The Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters. The following table gives their forms, along with IPA values for each letter's typical sound:

Older letters of the Russian alphabet include ⟨ѣ⟩, which merged to ⟨е⟩ (/je/ or /ʲe/); ⟨і⟩ and ⟨ѵ⟩, which both merged to ⟨и⟩ (/i/); ⟨ѳ⟩, which merged to ⟨ф⟩ (/f/); ⟨ѫ⟩, which merged to ⟨у⟩ (/u/); ⟨ѭ⟩, which merged to ⟨ю⟩ (/ju/ or /ʲu/); and ⟨ѧ⟩ and ⟨ѩ⟩, which later were graphically reshaped into ⟨я⟩ and merged phonetically to /ja/ or /ʲa/. While these older letters have been abandoned at one time or another, they may be used in this and related articles. The yers ⟨ъ⟩ and ⟨ь⟩ originally indicated the pronunciation of ultra-short or reduced /ŭ/, /ĭ/.

Transliteration

Because of many technical restrictions in computing and also because of the unavailability of Cyrillic keyboards abroad, Russian is often transliterated using the Latin alphabet. For example, мороз ('frost') is transliterated moroz, and мышь ('mouse'), mysh or myš'. Once commonly used by the majority of those living outside Russia, transliteration is being used less frequently by Russian-speaking typists in favor of the extension of Unicode character encoding, which fully incorporates the Russian alphabet. Free programs are available offering this Unicode extension, which allow users to type Russian characters, even on Western 'QWERTY' keyboards.^[91]

Computing

The Russian alphabet has many systems of character encoding. KOI8-R was designed by the Soviet government and was intended to serve as the standard encoding. This encoding was and still is widely used in UNIX-like operating systems. Nevertheless, the spread of MS-DOS and OS/2 (IBM866), traditional Macintosh (ISO/IEC 8859-5) and Microsoft Windows (CP1251) meant the proliferation of many different encodings as de facto standards, with Windows-1251 becoming a de facto standard in Russian Internet and e-mail communication during the period of roughly 1995–2005.

All the obsolete 8-bit encodings are rarely used in the communication protocols and text-exchange data formats, having been mostly replaced with UTF-8. A number of encoding conversion applications were developed. "iconv" is an example that is supported by most versions of Linux, Macintosh and some other operating systems; but converters are rarely needed unless accessing texts created more than a few years ago.

In addition to the modern Russian alphabet, Unicode (and thus UTF-8) encodes the Early Cyrillic alphabet (which is very similar to the Greek alphabet), and all other Slavic and non-Slavic but Cyrillic-based alphabets.

Orthography

The current spelling follows the major reform of 1918, and the final codification of 1956. An update proposed in the late 1990s has met a hostile reception, and has not been formally adopted. The punctuation, originally based on Byzantine Greek, was in the 17th and 18th centuries reformulated on the French and German models.

According to the Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an optional acute accent (знак ударения) may, and sometimes should, be used to mark stress. For example, it is used to distinguish between otherwise identical words, especially when context does not make it obvious: замо́к (zamók – "lock") – за́мок (zámok – "castle"), сто́ящий (stóyashchy – "worthwhile") – стоя́щий (stoyáshchy – "standing"), чудно́ (chudnó – "this is odd") – чу́дно (chúdno – "this is marvellous"), молоде́ц (molodéts – "well done!") – мо́лодец (mólodets – "fine young man"), узна́ю (uznáyu – "I shall learn it") – узнаю́ (uznayú – "I recognize it"), отреза́ть (otrezát – "to be cutting") – отре́зать (otrézat – "to have cut"); to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words, especially personal and family names, like афе́ра (aféra, "scandal, affair"), гу́ру (gúru, "guru"), Гарси́я (García), Оле́ша (Olésha), Фе́рми (Fermi), and to show which is the stressed word in a sentence, for example Ты́ съел печенье? (Tý syel pechenye? – "Was it you who ate the cookie?") – Ты съе́л печенье? (Ty syél pechenye? – "Did you eat the cookie?) – Ты съел пече́нье? (Ty syel pechénye? "Was it the cookie you ate?"). Stress marks are mandatory in lexical dictionaries and books for children or Russian learners.

Discover more about Alphabet related topics

Russian Braille

Russian Braille

Russian Braille is the braille alphabet of the Russian language. With suitable extensions, it is used for languages of neighboring countries that are written in Cyrillic in print, such as Ukrainian and Mongolian. It is based on the Latin transliteration of Cyrillic, with additional letters assigned idiosyncratically. In Russian, it is known as Шрифт Брайля.

Alphabet book

Alphabet book

An alphabet book is a type of children's book giving basic instruction in an alphabet. Intended for young children, alphabet books commonly use pictures, simple language and alliteration to aid language learning. Alphabet books are published in several languages, and some distinguish the capitals and lower case letters in a given alphabet.

Ivan Fyodorov (printer)

Ivan Fyodorov (printer)

Ivan Fyodorov or Ivan Fеdorov sometimes transliterated as Fiodorov, was one of the fathers of Eastern Slavonic printing, he was the first known Russian printer in Moscow and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, he was also a skilled cannon maker and the inventor of a multibarreled mortar.

Cyrillic script

Cyrillic script

The Cyrillic script, Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, North Asia, and East Asia.

A (Cyrillic)

A (Cyrillic)

А is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents an open central unrounded vowel, halfway between the pronunciation of ⟨a⟩ in "cat" and "father". The Cyrillic letter А is romanized using the Latin letter A.

Be (Cyrillic)

Be (Cyrillic)

Be is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the voiced bilabial plosive, like the English pronunciation of ⟨b⟩ in "ball". It should not be confused with the Cyrillic letter Ve (В в), which is shaped like Latin capital letter B but represents the voiced labiodental fricative. The Cyrillic letter Б (Be) is romanized using the Latin letter B.

Ge (Cyrillic)

Ge (Cyrillic)

Ge, ghe, or he is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It represents the voiced velar plosive, like ⟨g⟩ in "gift", or the voiced glottal fricative, like ⟨h⟩ in "heft". It is generally romanized using the Latin letter g or h, depending on the source language.

De (Cyrillic)

De (Cyrillic)

De is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the voiced dental stop, like the pronunciation of ⟨d⟩ in "door". De is usually romanised using the Latin letter D.

I (Cyrillic)

I (Cyrillic)

I is a letter used in almost all Cyrillic alphabets with the exception of Belarusian.

Ka (Cyrillic)

Ka (Cyrillic)

Ka is a letter of the Cyrillic script.

El (Cyrillic)

El (Cyrillic)

El is a letter of the Cyrillic script.

Em (Cyrillic)

Em (Cyrillic)

Em is a letter of the Cyrillic script.

The phonological system of Russian is inherited from Common Slavonic; it underwent considerable modification in the early historical period before being largely settled around the year 1400.

The language possesses five vowels (or six, under the St. Petersburg Phonological School), which are written with different letters depending on whether the preceding consonant is palatalized. The consonants typically come in plain vs. palatalized pairs, which are traditionally called hard and soft. The hard consonants are often velarized, especially before front vowels, as in Irish and Marshallese. The standard language, based on the Moscow dialect, possesses heavy stress and moderate variation in pitch. Stressed vowels are somewhat lengthened, while unstressed vowels tend to be reduced to near-close vowels or an unclear schwa. (See also: vowel reduction in Russian.)

The Russian syllable structure can be quite complex, with both initial and final consonant clusters of up to four consecutive sounds. Using a formula with V standing for the nucleus (vowel) and C for each consonant, the maximal structure can be described as follows:

(C)(C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C)

However, Russian has a constraint on syllabification such that syllables cannot span multiple morphemes.

Clusters of four consonants are not very common, especially within a morpheme. Some examples are: взгляд ([vzglʲat] vzglyad, 'glance'), государств ([gəsʊˈdarstf] gosudarstv, 'of the states'), строительств ([strɐˈitʲɪlʲstf] stroitelstv, 'of the constructions').

Consonants

Russian is notable for its distinction based on palatalization of most of its consonants. While /ts, k, ɡ, x/ do have true palatalized allophones [tsʲ, kʲ, ɡʲ, xʲ], only /kʲ/ might be considered a phoneme, though it is marginal and generally not considered distinctive. The only native minimal pair that argues for /kʲ/ being a separate phoneme is это ткёт ([ˈɛtə tkʲɵt] eto tkyot – "it weaves") – этот кот ([ˈɛtət kot], etot kot – "this cat"). The phoneme /ts/ is generally considered to be always hard; however, loan words such as Цюрих and some other neologisms contain /tsʲ/ through the word-building processes (e.g. фрицёнок, шпицята). Palatalization means that the center of the tongue is raised during and after the articulation of the consonant. In the case of /tʲ/ and /dʲ/, the tongue is raised enough to produce slight frication (affricate sounds; cf. Belarusian ць, дзь, or Polish ć, dź). The sounds /t, d, ts, s, z, n, rʲ/ are dental, that is, pronounced with the tip of the tongue against the teeth rather than against the alveolar ridge.

Vowels

Russian vowel chart by Trofimov & Jones (1923:55)

Russian has five or six vowels in stressed syllables, /i, u, e, o, a/, and in some analyses /ɨ/, but in most cases these vowels have merged to only two to four vowels when unstressed: /i, u, a/ (or /ɨ, u, a/) after hard consonants and /i, u/ after soft ones. These vowels have several allophones, which are displayed on the diagram to the right.

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Russian phonology

Russian phonology

This article discusses the phonological system of standard Russian based on the Moscow dialect. For an overview of dialects in the Russian language, see Russian dialects. Most descriptions of Russian describe it as having five vowel phonemes, though there is some dispute over whether a sixth vowel,, is separate from. Russian has 34 consonants, which can be divided into two types:hard or plain soft or palatalized

Palatalization (phonetics)

Palatalization (phonetics)

In phonetics, palatalization or palatization is a way of pronouncing a consonant in which part of the tongue is moved close to the hard palate. Consonants pronounced this way are said to be palatalized and are transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet by affixing the letter ⟨ʲ⟩ to the base consonant. Palatalization cannot minimally distinguish words in most dialects of English, but it may do so in languages such as Russian, Mandarin, and Irish.

Velarization

Velarization

Velarization or velarisation is a secondary articulation of consonants by which the back of the tongue is raised toward the velum during the articulation of the consonant. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, velarization is transcribed by one of four diacritics:A tilde or swung dash through the letter U+0334 ̴ COMBINING TILDE OVERLAY covers velarization, uvularization and pharyngealization, as in A superscript Latin gamma U+02E0 ˠ MODIFIER LETTER SMALL GAMMA after the letter standing for the velarized consonant, as in ⟨tˠ⟩ To distinguish velarization from a velar fricative release, ⟨ᵚ⟩ may be used instead of ⟨ˠ⟩ A superscript ⟨w⟩ U+02B7 ʷ MODIFIER LETTER SMALL W indicates either simultaneous velarization and labialization, as in ⟨sʷ⟩ or ⟨pʷ⟩, or labialization of a velar consonant, as in ⟨kʷ⟩.

Schwa

Schwa

In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa is a vowel sound denoted by the IPA symbol ⟨ə⟩, placed in the central position of the vowel chart. In English and some other languages, it usually represents the mid central vowel sound, produced when the lips, tongue, and jaw are completely relaxed, such as the vowel sound of the ⟨a⟩ in the English word about.

Syllable

Syllable

A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins. Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre and its stress patterns. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ignite is made of two syllables: ig and nite.

Morpheme

Morpheme

A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.

Labial consonant

Labial consonant

Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. The two common labial articulations are bilabials, articulated using both lips, and labiodentals, articulated with the lower lip against the upper teeth, both of which are present in English. A third labial articulation is dentolabials, articulated with the upper lip against the lower teeth, normally only found in pathological speech. Generally precluded are linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue contacts the posterior side of the upper lip, making them coronals, though sometimes, they behave as labial consonants.

Alveolar consonant

Alveolar consonant

Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the upper teeth. Alveolar consonants may be articulated with the tip of the tongue, as in English, or with the flat of the tongue just above the tip, as in French and Spanish.

Dental consonant

Dental consonant

A dental consonant is a consonant articulated with the tongue against the upper teeth, such as, . In some languages, dentals are distinguished from other groups, such as alveolar consonants, in which the tongue contacts the gum ridge. Dental consonants share acoustic similarity and in Latin script are generally written with consistent symbols.

Postalveolar consonant

Postalveolar consonant

Postalveolar or post-alveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the back of the alveolar ridge. Articulation is farther back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but not as far back as the hard palate, the place of articulation for palatal consonants. Examples of postalveolar consonants are the English palato-alveolar consonants, as in the words "ship", "'chill", "vision", and "jump", respectively.

Palatal consonant

Palatal consonant

Palatals are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate. Consonants with the tip of the tongue curled back against the palate are called retroflex.

Velar consonant

Velar consonant

Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth.

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Russian has preserved an Indo-European synthetic-inflectional structure, although considerable leveling has occurred. Russian grammar encompasses:

• a highly fusional morphology
• a syntax that, for the literary language, is the conscious fusion of three elements:^[92]
  • a polished vernacular foundation;
  • a Church Slavonic inheritance;
  • a Western European style.

The spoken language has been influenced by the literary one but continues to preserve characteristic forms. The dialects show various non-standard grammatical features,^[93] some of which are archaisms or descendants of old forms since discarded by the literary language.

In terms of actual grammar, there are three tenses in Russian – past, present, and future – and each verb has two aspects (perfective and imperfective). Russian nouns each have a gender – either feminine, masculine, or neuter, chiefly indicated by spelling at the end of the word. Words change depending on both their gender and function in the sentence. Russian has six cases: Nominative (for the grammatical subject), Accusative (for direct objects), Dative (for indirect objects), Genitive (to indicate possession or relation), Instrumental (to indicate 'with' or 'by means of'), and Prepositional (used after the locative prepositions в "in", на "on", о "about", при "in the presence of"). Verbs of motion in Russian – such as 'go', 'walk', 'run', 'swim', and 'fly' – use the imperfective or perfective form to indicate a single or return trip, and also use a multitude of prefixes to add shades of meaning to the verb. Such verbs also take on different forms to distinguish between concrete and abstract motion.

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Russian grammar

Russian grammar

Russian grammar employs an Indo-European inflexional structure, with considerable adaptation.

Indo-European languages

Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish, have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, of which there are eight groups with languages still alive today: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic; and another nine subdivisions that are now extinct.

Synthetic language

Synthetic language

A synthetic language uses inflection or agglutination to express syntactic relationships within a sentence. Inflection is the addition of morphemes to a root word that assigns grammatical property to that word, while agglutination is the combination of two or more morphemes into one word. The information added by morphemes can include indications of a word's grammatical category, such as whether a word is the subject or object in the sentence. Morphology can be either relational or derivational.

Inflection

Inflection

In linguistic morphology, inflection is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles, etc., as declension.

Fusional language

Fusional language

Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features.

Vernacular

Vernacular

A vernacular or vernacular language is in contrast with a "standard language." It refers to the language or dialect that is spoken by people that are inhabiting a particular country or region. The vernacular is typically the native language, normally spoken informally rather than written, and seen as of lower status than more codified forms. It may vary from more prestigious speech varieties in different ways, in that the vernacular can be a distinct stylistic register, a regional dialect, a sociolect, or an independent language. Vernacular is a term for a type of speech variety, generally used to refer to a local language or dialect, as distinct from what is seen as a standard language. The vernacular is contrasted with higher-prestige forms of language, such as national, literary, liturgical or scientific idiom, or a lingua franca, used to facilitate communication across a large area.

Grammatical aspect in Slavic languages

Grammatical aspect in Slavic languages

In almost all modern Slavic languages, only one type of aspectual opposition governs verbs, verb phrases and verb-related structures, manifesting in two grammatical aspects: perfective and imperfective. The aspectual distinctions exist on the lexical level - speakers have no universal method of forming a perfective verb from a given imperfective one. Perfective verbs are most often formed by means of prefixes, changes in the root, using a completely different root (suppletion), or changes in stress. Possessing a prefix does not necessarily mean that a verb is perfective.

Grammatical case

Grammatical case

A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nominal groups consisting of a noun and its modifiers belong to one of a few such categories. For instance, in English, one says I see them and they see me: the nominative pronouns I/they represent the perceiver and the accusative pronouns me/them represent the phenomenon perceived. Here, nominative and accusative are cases, that is, categories of pronouns corresponding to the functions they have in representation.

Prefix

Prefix

A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Adding it to the beginning of one word changes it into another word. For example, when the prefix un- is added to the word happy, it creates the word unhappy. Particularly in the study of languages, a prefix is also called a preformative, because it alters the form of the words to which it is affixed.

This page from an "ABC" book printed in Moscow in 1694 shows the letter П.

See History of the Russian language for an account of the successive foreign influences on Russian.

The number of listed words or entries in some of the major dictionaries published during the past two centuries, are as follows:^[94][95]

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History of the Russian language

History of the Russian language

Russian is an East Slavic language of the Indo-European family. All Indo-European languages are descendants of a single prehistoric language, reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic era. Although no written records remain, much of the culture and religion of the Proto-Indo-European people can also be reconstructed based on their daughter cultures traditionally and continuing to inhabit most of Europe and South Asia, areas to where the Proto-Indo-Europeans migrated from their original homeland.

Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language

Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language

The Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language, commonly known as Dal's Explanatory Dictionary, is a major explanatory dictionary of the Russian language. It contains about 220,000 words and 30,000 proverbs. It was collected, edited and published by academician Vladimir Ivanovich Dal, one of the most prominent Russian language lexicographers and folklore collectors of the 19th century.

Dmitry Ushakov

Dmitry Ushakov

Dmitry Nikolayevich Ushakov was a Russian philologist and lexicographer.

Sergey Ozhegov

Sergey Ozhegov

Sergey Ivanovich Ozhegov was a Russian lexicographer who in 1926 graduated from the Leningrad University where his teachers included Lev Shcherba and Viktor Vinogradov.

Wiktionary

Wiktionary

Wiktionary is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of terms in all natural languages and in a number of artificial languages. These entries may contain definitions, images for illustration, pronunciations, etymologies, inflections, usage examples, quotations, related terms, and translations of terms into other languages, among other features. It is collaboratively edited via a wiki. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki and dictionary. It is available in 187 languages and in Simple English. Like its sister project Wikipedia, Wiktionary is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, and is written collaboratively by volunteers, dubbed "Wiktionarians". Its wiki software, MediaWiki, allows almost anyone with access to the website to create and edit entries.

No single periodization is universally accepted, but the history of the Russian language is sometimes divided into the following periods:^[96][97][98]

• Old Russian (Old East Slavic) (10th–14th centuries)
• Middle Russian (14th–17th centuries)
• Modern Russian national language (17th century–present)

The history of the Russian language is also divided into Old Russian from the 11th to 17th centuries, followed by Modern Russian.^[98]

Judging by the historical records, by approximately 1000 AD the predominant ethnic group over much of modern European Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus was the Eastern branch of the Slavs, speaking a closely related group of dialects. The political unification of this region into Kievan Rus' in about 880, from which modern Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus trace their origins, established Old East Slavic as a literary and commercial language. It was soon followed by the adoption of Christianity in 988 and the introduction of the South Slavic Old Church Slavonic as the liturgical and official language. Borrowings and calques from Byzantine Greek began to enter the Old East Slavic and spoken dialects at this time, which in their turn modified the Old Church Slavonic as well.

The Ostromir Gospels of 1056 is the second oldest East Slavic book known, one of many medieval illuminated manuscripts preserved in the Russian National Library.

Dialectal differentiation accelerated after the breakup of Kievan Rus' in approximately 1100. On the territories of modern Belarus and Ukraine emerged Ruthenian and in modern Russia medieval Russian. They became distinct since the 13th century, i.e. following the division of the land between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Poland in the west and independent Novgorod and Pskov feudal republics plus numerous small duchies (which came to be vassals of the Tatars) in the east.

The official language in Moscow and Novgorod, and later, in the growing Muscovy, was Church Slavonic, which evolved from Old Church Slavonic and remained the literary language for centuries, until the Petrine age, when its usage became limited to biblical and liturgical texts. Russian developed under a strong influence of Church Slavonic until the close of the 17th century; afterward the influence reversed, leading to corruption of liturgical texts.

The political reforms of Peter the Great (Пётр Вели́кий, Pyótr Velíky) were accompanied by a reform of the alphabet, and achieved their goal of secularization and Westernization. Blocks of specialized vocabulary were adopted from the languages of Western Europe. By 1800, a significant portion of the gentry spoke French daily, and German sometimes. Many Russian novels of the 19th century, e.g. Leo Tolstoy's (Лев Толсто́й) War and Peace, contain entire paragraphs and even pages in French with no translation given, with an assumption that educated readers would not need one.

The modern literary language is usually considered to date from the time of Alexander Pushkin (Алекса́ндр Пу́шкин) in the first third of the 19th century. Pushkin revolutionized Russian literature by rejecting archaic grammar and vocabulary (so-called высо́кий стиль — "high style") in favor of grammar and vocabulary found in the spoken language of the time. Even modern readers of younger age may only experience slight difficulties understanding some words in Pushkin's texts, since relatively few words used by Pushkin have become archaic or changed meaning. In fact, many expressions used by Russian writers of the early 19th century, in particular Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov (Михаи́л Ле́рмонтов), Nikolai Gogol (Никола́й Го́голь), Aleksander Griboyedov (Алекса́ндр Грибое́дов), became proverbs or sayings which can be frequently found even in modern Russian colloquial speech.

Winter Evening

Reading of excerpt of Pushkin's "Winter Evening" (Зимний вечер), 1825.

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The political upheavals of the early 20th century and the wholesale changes of political ideology gave written Russian its modern appearance after the spelling reform of 1918. Political circumstances and Soviet accomplishments in military, scientific, and technological matters (especially cosmonautics), gave Russian a worldwide prestige, especially during the mid-20th century.

During the Soviet period, the policy toward the languages of the various other ethnic groups fluctuated in practice. Though each of the constituent republics had its own official language, the unifying role and superior status was reserved for Russian, although it was declared the official language only in 1990.^[99] Following the break-up of the USSR in 1991, several of the newly independent states have encouraged their native languages, which has partly reversed the privileged status of Russian, though its role as the language of post-Soviet national discourse throughout the region has continued.

The Russian language in the world declined after 1991 due to the collapse of the Soviet Union and decrease in the number of Russians in the world and diminution of the total population in Russia (where Russian is an official language), however this has since been reversed.^{[47][100][101]}

According to figures published in 2006 in the journal "Demoskop Weekly" research deputy director of Research Center for Sociological Research of the Ministry of Education and Science (Russia) Arefyev A. L.,^[102] the Russian language is gradually losing its position in the world in general, and in Russia in particular.^{[100][103][104][105]} In 2012, A. L. Arefyev published a new study "Russian language at the turn of the 20th–21st centuries", in which he confirmed his conclusion about the trend of weakening of the Russian language after the Soviet Union's collapse in various regions of the world (findings published in 2013 in the journal "Demoskop Weekly").^{[47][106][107][108]} In the countries of the former Soviet Union the Russian language was being replaced or used in conjunction with local languages.^[47][109] Currently, the number of speakers of Russian in the world depends on the number of Russians in the world and total population in Russia.^{[47][100][101]}

Discover more about History and examples related topics

History of the Russian language

History of the Russian language

Russian is an East Slavic language of the Indo-European family. All Indo-European languages are descendants of a single prehistoric language, reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic era. Although no written records remain, much of the culture and religion of the Proto-Indo-European people can also be reconstructed based on their daughter cultures traditionally and continuing to inhabit most of Europe and South Asia, areas to where the Proto-Indo-Europeans migrated from their original homeland.

Reforms of Russian orthography

Reforms of Russian orthography

The Russian orthography has been reformed officially and unofficially by changing the Russian alphabet over the course of the history of the Russian language. Several important reforms happened in the 18th–20th centuries.

Old East Slavic

Old East Slavic

Old East Slavic was a language used during the 5th–16th centuries by the East Slavs from which the Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn, and Ukrainian languages later evolved.

Kievan Rus'

Kievan Rus'

Kievan Rus', also known as Kyivan Rus', was a state and later an amalgam of principalities in Eastern and Northern Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century. Encompassing a variety of polities and peoples, including East Slavic, Norse, and Finnic, it was ruled by the Rurik dynasty, founded by the Varangian prince Rurik. The modern nations of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine all claim Kievan Rus' as their cultural ancestor, with Belarus and Russia deriving their names from it. At its greatest extent in the mid-11th century, Kievan Rus' stretched from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south and from the headwaters of the Vistula in the west to the Taman Peninsula in the east, uniting the East Slavic tribes.

Old Church Slavonic

Old Church Slavonic

Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic was the first Slavic literary language.

Calque

Calque

In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, to create a new lexeme in the target language. For instance, the English word "skyscraper" was calqued in dozens of other languages. Another notable example is the Latin weekday names, which came to be associated by ancient Germanic speakers with their own gods following a practice known as interpretatio germanicacode: lat promoted to code: la : the Latin "Day of Mercury", Mercurii diescode: lat promoted to code: la , was borrowed into Late Proto-Germanic as the "Day of Wōđanaz" (*Wodanesdag), which became Wōdnesdæg in Old English, then "Wednesday" in Modern English.

Ostromir Gospels

Ostromir Gospels

The Ostromir Gospels is the oldest dated East Slavic book.. The Ostromir Gospels was created by deacon Gregory for his patron, Posadnik Ostromir of Novgorod, in 1056 or 1057, probably as a gift for a monastery.

East Slavic languages

East Slavic languages

The East Slavic languages constitute one of three regional subgroups of the Slavic languages, distinct from the West and South Slavic languages. East Slavic languages are currently spoken natively throughout Eastern Europe, and eastwards to Siberia and the Russian Far East. In part due to the large historical influence of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, the Russian language is also spoken as a lingua franca in many regions of Caucasus and Central Asia. Of the three Slavic branches, East Slavic is the most spoken, with the number of native speakers larger than the Western and Southern branches combined.

Illuminated manuscript

Illuminated manuscript

An illuminated manuscript is a formally prepared document where the text is often supplemented with flourishes such as borders and miniature illustrations. Often used in the Roman Catholic Church for prayers, liturgical services and psalms, the practice continued into secular texts from the 13th century onward and typically include proclamations, enrolled bills, laws, charters, inventories and deeds.

Ruthenian language

Ruthenian language

Ruthenian is an exonymic linguonym for a closely-related group of East Slavic linguistic varieties, particularly those spoken from the 15th to 18th centuries in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and in East Slavic regions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Regional distribution of those varieties, both in their literary and vernacular forms, corresponded approximately to the territories of the modern states of Belarus and Ukraine. By the end of the 18th century, they gradually diverged into regional variants, which subsequently developed into the modern Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Rusyn languages.

Grand Duchy of Lithuania

Grand Duchy of Lithuania

The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a European state that existed from the 13th century to 1795, when the territory was partitioned among the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the Habsburg Empire of Austria. The state was founded by Lithuanians, who were at the time a polytheistic nation born from several united Baltic tribes from Aukštaitija.