August 13, 2018

Russian is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. It is the official language of the Russian Federation, the world’s largest country in area. Russian is also spoken in countries of the former Soviet Union, which existed from 1922 to 1991. These countries include Armenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine. Russian is one of the five official languages of the United Nations. It is also an important language in countries with large Russian immigrant populations, such as Canada, Israel, and the United States.

The Russian flag flies over more than 140 million Russian speakers. Credit: © Maximumvector/Shutterstock

Russian is one of the world’s great literary languages. The country has produced many famous poets, novelists, and playwrights, including Anna Akhmatova, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The Nobel Prize for literature has been awarded to the Russian writers Ivan Bunin (1933), Boris Pasternak (1958), Mikhail Sholokhov (1965), and Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1970). In 1987, the prize was awarded to the Russian-born poet Joseph Brodsky, who came to the United States in 1972 and was appointed poet laureate of the United States for 1991-1992.

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Russia. Credit: WORLD BOOK map

The Russian alphabet has 33 characters. Russian grammar has many prefixes, suffixes, endings, and vowel forms. Most words change with their function, gender, and number. The stress can be placed on any syllable. Because there are no set rules for stress, the accent of each word has to be learned separately. Russian verbs possess a characteristic called aspect. The imperfect aspect indicates a continuing action. The perfect aspect indicates an action already completed or to be completed in the future.

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The Russian alphabet has 33 letters. The alphabet is also called Cyrillic and is based on the Greek alphabet. Credit: WORLD BOOK illustration

Russian is a member of the Slavic group of languages. All Slavic languages probably developed from the ancient Common Slavic language. In the 800’s, the Greek missionaries Cyril and Methodius translated the Bible into the language later known as Old Church Slavonic. In their translation, they invented the Cyrillic alphabet based on Greek characters. In its final form, the Cyrillic alphabet is an important part of the alphabet of modern Russian.

The earliest formal Russian literature was written chiefly in Old Church Slavonic, the language of the Russian Orthodox Church. By the 900’s, three Slavic dialects had emerged—northern, central, and western. By the 1000’s, a distinct Russian language existed, used primarily for legal and business documents. Until the mid-1700’s, Old Church Slavonic was the written language of Russia. In the mid-1800’s, Standard Russian, based on the central dialect used in Moscow, became the official national language.

Several Russian words have found their way into English, including balaclava (similar to a ski mask), beluga (whale), blini (a small pancake), commissar, cosmonaut (Russian astronaut), czar, gulag, sable, samovar (a type of teapot), troika, and vodka.