Russian is an East Slavic language belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is one of the four extant East Slavic languages, and is the native language of the Russian people. Russian was the de facto (and de jure in its final years) official language of the former Soviet Union.Constitution and Fundamental Law of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1977: Section II, Chapter 6, Article 36 It has remained an official language of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, has constitutional status as the language of inter-ethnic communication in Tajikistan, and is still used as a lingua franca in Ukraine, Moldova, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and to a lesser extent in the Baltic states and Israel.
Russian has over 210 million total speakers worldwide. It is the most spoken native language in Europe, the most spoken Slavic language, and the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia. It is the world's seventh-most spoken language by number of native speakers, and the world's eleventh-most spoken language by total number of speakers. Russian is one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station, one of the six official languages of the United Nations, as well as the seventh most widely used language on the Internet.
Russian is written using the Russian alphabet of the Cyrillic script; it distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called "soft" and "hard" sounds. Almost every consonant has hard–soft counterparts, and the distinction is a prominent feature of the language, which is usually shown in writing not by a change of the consonant but rather by changing the following vowel. Another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels. Stress, which is often unpredictable, is not normally indicated orthographically, though an optional acute accent may be used to mark stress, such as to distinguish between homographic words (e.g. [, 'lock'] and [, 'castle']), or to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words or proper nouns.
Russian is a typical fusional language, where a single inflectional morpheme at the end of a word is used to denote multiple grammatical features. In addition to inflection for morphology Russian also actively uses prefixes and suffixes for word formation, more so than most other Slavic languages. Also, Russian uses descriptive phrases (like , , lit. 'iron road') where other Slavic languages often prefer single-word derivatives (such as Czech ).
Name of the language The linguonym russky yazyk () is historically associated with the ethnonym and toponym (), from which the forms () and related variants developed. is found in Russian literary monuments of the 11th–14th centuries, while the modern form, (), began to appear in Russian writing in the 15th century.
In Russian literary monuments of the 15th–16th centuries, the Byzantine-influenced forms () and () emerged. By the early 17th century, the terms (, ) and (, ) became established in Russian usage, alongside the forms () and (), which arose under Greek influence. The adjective () also came into use as a designation for the language; both and were treated as synonyms, while the Greek-influenced forms predominated in the "high style" of the language.
By the early 19th century, and had come to be perceived as archaic, while was revived and gradually displaced as the ethnic designation associated with the Russian language. The adjective subsequently became associated primarily with state affiliation rather than ethnicity.
Classification Russian is an East Slavic language of the wider Indo-European family, alongside Belarusian, Rusyn, and Ukrainian. In many places in eastern and southern Ukraine and throughout Belarus, these languages are spoken interchangeably, and in certain areas, traditional bilingualism has resulted in language mixtures such as surzhyk in eastern Ukraine and trasianka in Belarus. Many speakers do not perceive these as mixtures, but instead as local varieties of Russian or Belarusian/Ukrainian.
Russian also has notable lexical similarities with Bulgarian due to a common Church Slavonic influence on both languages, but because of later developments in the 19th and 20th centuries, modern Bulgarian grammar differs markedly from Russian. The use of Church Slavonic as a literary language in the medieval period gave Russian a large number of borrowings and calques ultimately derived from Greek. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Russian Orthodoxy became more self-contained, and over time, the Russian recension of Church Slavonic came to influence the Bulgarian and Serbian recensions of Church Slavonic. The influence of Church Slavonic on Russian can still be seen in certain aspects of phonology, grammar, and particularly lexis.
The Old Novgorod dialect, a historical variety of Russian with unique northwestern dialectal features, is sometimes considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian.
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, and to a lesser extent the languages to the south and the east: Uralic, Turkic, Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew.
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.
Standard Russian
Feudal divisions and conflicts created obstacles between the Russian principalities before and especially during Mongol rule. This strengthened dialectal differences, and for a while, prevented the emergence of a standardized national language. The formation of the unified and centralized Russian state in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the gradual re-emergence of a common political, economic, and cultural space created the need for a common standard language. The initial impulse for standardization came from the government bureaucracy for the lack of a reliable tool of communication in administrative, legal, and judicial affairs became an obvious practical problem. The earliest attempts at standardizing Russian were made based on the so-called Moscow official or chancery language, during the 15th to 17th centuries. However, the use of Church Slavonic by the church meant that Russian had a secondary status. By the 17th century, the idea of expanding the use of Russian had emerged when it became clear that Church Slavonic was ill-suited for use in administrative and business matters. 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.
The current standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language (), or Contemporary Standard Russian. 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 dialect substratum under some influence of the Russian chancery language. The Moscow dialect had a northern dialectal base, but after Moscow became the center of a unified state, the attraction of southern dialectal speakers led to the emergence of a transitional dialect group. Peter regarded the standardization of Russian as essential to the development of a modern system of government, education and science, and consequently, to Russia's economic development. By the early 18th century, Russian had replaced Church Slavonic in secular matters. The spread of the Russian literary language was further advanced by a new generation of intellectuals, including Mikhail Lomonosov, who authored the first scientific grammar of Russian and developed a theoretical system of stylistic registers. In addition, he introduced several new literary genres derived from Western European literary traditions. The re-emergence and standardization of Russian for official, administrative, and commercial use laid the foundations for modern Russian.
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.Nakhimovsky,A.D.(2019).The Language of Russian Peasants in the Twentieth Century: A Linguistic Analysis and Oral History.United Kingdom:Lexington Books. (Chapter 1) This was acknowledged by the noted Russian dialectologist Nikolai Karinsky, 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."Nakhimovsky,A.D.(2019).The Language of Russian Peasants in the Twentieth Century: A Linguistic Analysis and Oral History.United Kingdom:Lexington Books. (p.2)
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.
Geographic distribution
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.
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.
Europe