Russian Language

Russian is the most important of the Slavic languages and now one of the major languages of the world. The emergence of the Soviet Union in the postwar period as a major world power, coupled with impressive achievements in science and technology, has significantly increased the interest in and the study of Russian in recent years. With English, French, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic, Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.
Of the 150 million people in the Russian Federation, about 125 million are native Russians, with many members of other nationalities speaking the language with varying degrees of fluency. About 30 million Russians also live in the newly independent states that were once part of the Soviet Union, with the numbers by country as follows: Ukraine — 12 million; Kazakhstan — 8 million; Belarus — 3½ million; Uzbekistan — 2½ million; Latvia — one million; Kyrgystan — one million; Moldova — 600,000; Azerbaijan — 500,000; Turkmenistan — 400,000; Lithuania — 350,000; Armenia — 50,000. Latest figures also show 250,000 Russian speakers in the United States and 40,000 in Canada.

Russian is written in the Cyrillic alphabet, whose origin dates from the 9th century. Its creators were two missionaries from Greece, the brothers Cyril and Methodius, who based it largely on the Greek. Though appearing formidable to one who has never studied it, the Russian alphabet is not difficult to learn. A number of letters are written and pronounced approximately as in English (A, K, M, 0, T), while others, though written as in English, are pronounced differently (B = V, E = YE, Ë = YO, H = N, P = R, C = S, X = KH).

Russian is spoken/used in the following countries: Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bashkortostan, Belarus, Canada, Estonia, Georgia, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Svalbard, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, United States of America, Uzbekistan.

Language Family

Family: Indo-European
Subgroup: Slavic
Branch: Eastern

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