Russian ( Pyccкий яэык )

(dobro pozhalovat') - Welcome

Russian is the largest of the Slavic languages. Along with Belarusian and Ukrainian, it belongs to the East Slavic group of the Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. Russian is primarily spoken in Russia and, to a lesser extent, in the other countries that were once part of the Soviet Union, as well in Eastern Europe. According to Ethnologue, there are 117,863,645 speakers of Russian in Russia alone. It is also spoken in Canada, China, Finland,Germany, Greece, India, Israel, and the U.S. It is estimated that it is the primary language of over 145 million speakers worldwide (Ethnologue).

Prior to the 14th century, ancestors of the modern Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians spoke varieties of Old East Slavic -- a language that was common to all three. Linguists think that it split into what are now Russian, Belarusan, and Ukrainian at the end of the 14th century.

The official language in Russia remained an East Slavic version of Church Slavonic, the liturgical language of the Russian Orthodox Church, until the end of the 17th century. The political reforms of Peter the Great in the 18th century which included a reform of the Russian alphabet and westernization of the language through numerous borrowings from Western European languages resulted in a further move away from Church Slavonic norms. The standard language assumed its modern form in the 19th century.

The Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing political changes brought new terminology and, along with the spelling reform of 1918, gave written Russian its modern appearance. Literacy became nearly universal and dialectal differentiation decreased in large part due to universal schooling and mass communications. Superpower accomplishments in military, scientific, and technological fields as well as space exploration gave modern Russian its world-wide prestige.
Click on the MLA Interactive Language Map to see where Russian is spoken in the United States.

Russian is the official language of Russia, and an official language of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Autonomous Republic of Crimea (in Ukraine) and the unrecognized Moldovan Republic of Transnistria. As a language of great political importance, Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.
Until 1917, it was the sole official language of the Russian Empire. During the Soviet period, though each of the republics had its own official language, Russian enjoyed a superior status. Following the break-up of the Soviet Union 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 lingua franca of the region has remained virtually unchanged.

Education in Russian is still a popular choice for many of the first and second language speakers of Russian in the former Soviet republics. For instance, 75% of the public school students in Belarus, 40% in Kazakhstan, and over 20% in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and Moldova receive their education entirely or primarily in Russian.

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