Russian language

Russian (русский язык, tr. rússkiy yazýk) is an East Slavic language, which is an official language in the Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as being widely used throughout Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, the Caucasus and Central Asia. 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.

Belarus, officially the Republic of Belarus, formerly known by its Russian name Byelorussia or Belorussia, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe bordered by Russia to the northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest.

Russian (русский язык, tr. rússkiy yazýk) is an East Slavic language, which is an official language in the Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as being widely used throughout Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Romanization of Russian is the process of transliterating the Russian language from the Cyrillic script into the Latin script.

Written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century onward.

Old East Slavic or Old Russian was a language used during the 10th–15th centuries by East Slavs in Kievan Rus' and states which evolved after the collapse of Kievan Rus', from which later the Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian languages evolved.

Russian (русский язык, tr. rússkiy yazýk) is an East Slavic language, which is an official language in the Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as being widely used throughout Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

The Kazakh language is the state language, and Russian has equal official status for all levels of administrative and institutional purposes.

Russian (русский язык, tr. rússkiy yazýk) is an East Slavic language, which is an official language in the Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as being widely used throughout Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Kyrgyz is closely related to other Turkic languages, although Russian remains widely spoken and is an official language, a legacy of a century of Russification.

The language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

Later, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian were added as working languages in the Economic and Social Council.

Russian is also the second most widespread language on the Internet after English.

Other top languages, according to W3Techs, are Russian, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Italian, and Persian.

Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages, one of the four living members of the East Slavic languages, and part of the larger Balto-Slavic branch.

The Indo-European languages with the greatest numbers of native speakers are Spanish, English, Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu), Portuguese, Bengali, Punjabi, and Russian, each with over 100 million speakers, with German, French, Marathi, Italian, and Persian also having more than 50 million.

From the point of view of spoken language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn, the other three languages in the East Slavic branch.

It is the official state language of Ukraine and one of the three official languages in the unrecognized state of Transnistria, the other two being Moldovan and Russian.

From the point of view of spoken language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn, the other three languages in the East Slavic branch.

It is the official language of Belarus, along with the Russian language.

It was the de facto language of the Soviet Union until its dissolution on 25 December 1991.

The word "Soviet" is derived from a Russian word сове́т (sovét) meaning council, assembly, advice, harmony, concord and all ultimately deriving from the proto-Slavic verbal stem of vět-iti ("to inform"), related to Slavic věst ("news"), English "wise", the root in "ad-vis-or" (which came to English through French), or the Dutch weten ("to know"; cf.

Another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels. Stress, which is unpredictable, is not normally indicated orthographically though an optional acute accent may be used to mark stress, such as to distinguish between homographic words, for example замо́к (zamók, meaning a lock) and за́мок (zámok, meaning a castle), or to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words or names.

Other languages, like English and Russian, have variable stress, where the position of stress in a word is not predictable in that way.

Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers and the seventh by total number of speakers.

For details, see Russian phonology and History of the Russian language.

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.

Surzhyk refers to a range of mixed (macaronic) sociolects of Ukrainian and Russian languages used in certain regions of Ukraine and adjacent lands.

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".

Great Russian language (Russian: Великорусский язык, Velikorusskiy yazyk) is a name given in the 19th century to the Russian language as opposed to the other two major East Slavic languages: Belarusian ("White Russian") and Ukrainian ("Little Russian").

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.

Trasianka refers to a mixed form of speech in which Belarusian and Russian elements and structures alternate in rapid succession.

Russian distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called soft and hard sounds.

In Russian, both plain and palatalized consonant phonemes are found in words like большой, царь and Катя.

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, and Arabic, as well as Hebrew.

German is also the second most widely taught foreign language in the EU after English at primary school level (but third after English and French at lower secondary level), the fourth most widely taught non-English language in the US (after Spanish, French and American Sign Language), and the second most commonly used scientific language as well as the third most widely used language on websites after English and Russian.

Stress, which is unpredictable, is not normally indicated orthographically though an optional acute accent may be used to mark stress, such as to distinguish between homographic words, for example замо́к (zamók, meaning a lock) and за́мок (zámok, meaning a castle), or to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words or names.

Russian (русский язык, tr. rússkiy yazýk) is an East Slavic language, which is an official language in the Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as being widely used throughout Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

The existing East Slavic languages are Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian; Rusyn is considered to be either a separate language or a dialect of Ukrainian.

Russian (русский язык, tr. rússkiy yazýk) is an East Slavic language, which is an official language in the Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as being widely used throughout Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Belarusian and Russian have official status in the Republic of Belarus.

It arose in 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.

Central or Middle Russian dialects is one of the main groups of the Russian dialects.

Despite the formalization of Standard Russian, some nonstandard dialectal features (such as fricative in Southern Russian dialects) are still observed in colloquial speech.

Southern Russian is one of the main groups of Russian dialects.

It is a descendant of the language used in Kievan Rus', a loose conglomerate of East Slavic tribes from the late 9th to the mid 13th centuries.

Nationalist accounts have suggested that the Rus' were present before the arrival of the Varangians, noting that only a handful of Scandinavian words can be found in modern Russian and that Scandinavian names in the early chronicles were soon replaced by Slavic names.