Classification
Russian is an East Slavic language of the wider Indo-European languages, Indo-European family. It is a descendant of the language used in Kievan Rus', a loose conglomerate of East Slavs, East Slavic tribes from the late 9th to the mid 13th centuries. From the point of view of spoken language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian language, Ukrainian, Belarusian language, Belarusian, and Rusyn, the other three languages in the East Slavic branch. 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. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect, although it vanished during the 15th or 16th century, is sometimes considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. Also Russian has notable lexical similarities with Bulgarian due to a common Church Slavonic influence on both languages, but because of later interaction in the 19th and 20th centuries, Bulgarian grammar differs markedly from Russian. In the 19th century (in Russia until 1917), the language was often called "Great Russian language, Great Russian" to distinguish it from Belarusian, then called "White Russian" and Ukrainian, then called "Little Russian". The vocabulary (mainly abstract and literary words), principles of word formations, and, to some extent, inflections and literary style of Russian have been also influenced by Church Slavonic language, Church Slavonic, a developed and partly Russified form of the South Slavic languages, South Slavic Old Church Slavonic language used by the Russian Orthodox Church. However, the East Slavic forms have tended to be used exclusively in the various dialects that are experiencing a rapid decline. In some cases, both the East Slavic and the Church Slavonic forms are in use, with many different meanings. ''For details, see Russian phonology and History of the Russian language.'' 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 language, Greek, Latin, Polish language, Polish, Dutch language, Dutch, German language, German, French language, French, Italian language, Italian, and English language, English, and to a lesser extent the languages to the south and the east: Uralic languages, Uralic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Persian language, Persian, Arabic language, Arabic, and Hebrew language, 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 language, English speakers, requiring approximately 1,100 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency. It is also regarded by the United States Intelligence Community as a "hard target" language, due to both its difficulty to master for English speakers and its critical role in American foreign policy, U.S. world policy.Standard Russian
Feudal divisions and conflicts, and other obstacles to the exchange of goods and ideas that ancient Russian principalities before and especially during Mongol rule, strengthened dialectical differences and for a while prevented the emergence of the standardized national language. The formation of the unified and centralized Russian state in 15th and 16th centuries and the gradual (re)emergence of a common political, economic, and cultural space have created the need for a common standard language. The initial impulse for the 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. 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'' ( – "sovremenny russky literaturny yazyk"). 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 (Central Russian dialects, Middle or Central Russian) dialect substratum under the influence of some of the previous century's Russian chancery language. Mikhail Lomonosov first compiled a normalizing grammar book in 1755; in 1783 the Russian Academy's first explanatory Russian dictionary appeared. During the end of the 18th and 19th centuries, a period known as the "Golden Age", the grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation of the Russian language was stabilized and standardized, and it became the nationwide literary language; meanwhile, Russia's world-famous literature flourished. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, the spoken form of the Russian language was that of the nobility and urban bourgeoise. Russian peasants - the great majority of the population - continued to speak in their own dialects. However, the peasant's speech was never systematically studied, as it was generally regarded by philologists as simply a source of folklore, and an object of curiosity. This was acknowledged by the noted Russian dialectologist Nikolai Karinsky (1873–1935) 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.” Post-1917, Marxist linguists had no interest in the multiplicity of peasant dialects, and regarded their language as a relic of the rapidly disappearing past, 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... the very process of recruiting workers from peasants and the mobility of worker population generate another process: the liquidation of peasant inheritance by way of leveling the particulars of local dialects. On the ruins of peasant multilingua, 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.By the mid-20th century, such dialects were forced out with the introduction of the compulsory education system that was established by the Soviet government. Despite the formalization of Standard Russian, some nonstandard dialectal features (such as fricative in Southern Russian dialects) are still observed in colloquial speech.
Geographic distribution
Europe
Asia
In Armenia, Russian has no official status, but it is recognized as a minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. 30% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 2% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Azerbaijan, Russian has no official status, but is a ''lingua franca'' of the country. 26% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 5% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In China, Russian has no official status, but it is spoken by the Russians in China, small Russian communities in the northeastern Heilongjiang province. In Georgia (country), Georgia, Russian has no official status, but it is recognized as a minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. Russian is the language of 9% of the population according to the World Factbook. Ethnologue cites Russian as the country's de facto working language. In Kazakhstan, Russian is not a state language, but according to article 7 of the Constitution of Kazakhstan its usage enjoys equal status to that of the Kazakh language in state and local administration. The 2009 census reported that 10,309,500 people, or 84.8% of the population aged 15 and above, could read and write well in Russian, and understand the spoken language. In Kyrgyzstan, Russian is a co-official language per article 5 of the Constitution of Kyrgyzstan. The 2009 census states that 482,200 people speak Russian as a native language, or 8.99% of the population. Additionally, 1,854,700 residents of Kyrgyzstan aged 15 and above fluently speak Russian as a second language, or 49.6% of the population in the age group. In Tajikistan, Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication under the Constitution of Tajikistan and is permitted in official documentation. 28% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 7% used it as the main language with family, friends or at work. The World Factbook notes that Russian is widely used in government and business. In Turkmenistan, Russian lost its status as the official ''lingua franca'' in 1996. Russian is spoken by 12% of the population according to an undated estimate from the World Factbook. Nevertheless, the Turkmen state press and websites regularly publish material in Russian and there is the Russian-language newspaper Neytralny Turkmenistan, the television channel Turkmenistan (TV channel), TV4, and there are schools like Joint Turkmen-Russian Secondary School. In Uzbekistan, Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication. It has some official roles, being permitted in official documentation and is the ''lingua franca'' of the country and the language of the elite. Russian is spoken by 14.2% of the population according to an undated estimate from the World Factbook. In 2005, Russian was the most widely taught foreign language in Mongolia, and was compulsory in Year 7 onward as a second foreign language in 2006. Russian is also spoken in Israel. The number of native Russian-speaking Israelis numbers around 1.5 million Israelis, 15% of the population. The Israeli Mass media, press and websites regularly publish material in Russian and there are Russian newspapers, television stations, schools, and social media outlets based in the country. There is an Israeli TV channel mainly broadcasting in Russian with Israel Plus. See also Russian language in Israel. Russian is also spoken as a second language by a small number of people in Afghanistan. In Vietnam, Russian has been added in the elementary curriculum along with Chinese and Japanese and were named as "first foreign languages" for Vietnamese students to learn, on equal footing with English.North America
The language was first introduced in North America when Russian explorers voyaged into Alaska and claimed it for Russia during the 18th century. Although most Russian colonists left after the United States bought the land in 1867, a handful stayed and preserved the Russian language in this region to this day, although only a few elderly speakers of this unique dialect are left. In Nikolaevsk, Alaska, Russian is more spoken than English. Sizable Russian-speaking communities also exist in North America, especially in large urban centers of the United States, U.S. and Canada, such as Russian Americans in New York City, New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, Nashville, Tennessee, Nashville, San Francisco, Seattle, Spokane, Washington, Spokane, Toronto, Calgary, History of the Russians in Baltimore, Baltimore, Miami, Chicago, Denver, and Cleveland. In a number of locations they issue their own newspapers, and live in ethnic enclaves (especially the generation of immigrants who started arriving in the early 1960s). Only about 25% of them are ethnic Russians, however. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the overwhelming majority of Russophones in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in New York City were Russian-speaking Jews. Afterward, the influx from the countries of the former Soviet Union changed the statistics somewhat, with ethnic Russians and Ukrainians immigrating along with some more Russian Jews and Central Asians. According to the United States Census, in 2007 Russian was the primary language spoken in the homes of over 850,000 individuals living in the United States. In the second half of the 20th century, Russian was the most popular foreign language in Cuba. Besides being taught at universities and schools, there were also educational programs on the radio and TV. However, starting January 2019 Cuban television opened an educational program devoted to the Russian language. This project is fully entitled to be called an anticipated one, because the Russian – Cuban collaboration is a strategic direction actively developed as more and more young people are interested in the Russian language, the Education navigator informs. The Havana State University has started a bachelor's specialization called the Russian Language and the Second Foreign Language. There is also the Russian language department, where students can scrutinize e-books without internet connection. Additional courses on the Russian language are open at two schools of the Cuban capital city. An estimated 200,000 people speak the Russian language in Cuba, on the account that more than 23,000 Cubans who took higher studies in the former Soviet Union and later in Russia, and another important group of people who studied at military schools and technologists, plus the nearly 2,000 Russians residing in Cuba and their descendants.As an international language
Russian is one of the official languages (or has similar status and interpretation must be provided into Russian) of the following: * United Nations * International Atomic Energy Agency * World Health Organization * International Civil Aviation Organization * UNESCO * World Intellectual Property Organization * International Telecommunication Union * World Meteorological Organization * Food and Agriculture Organization * International Fund for Agricultural Development * International Criminal Court * International Olympic Committee * Universal Postal Union * World Bank * Commonwealth of Independent States * Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe * Shanghai Cooperation Organisation * Eurasian Economic Community * Collective Security Treaty Organization * Antarctic Treaty Secretariat * International Organization for Standardization * International Mathematical Olympiad * Warsaw Pact (defunct) * Comecon, Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (defunct) The Russian language is also one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station – NASA astronauts who serve alongside Russian cosmonauts usually take Russian language courses. This practice goes back to the Apollo-Soyuz mission, which first flew in 1975. In March 2013, it was announced that Russian is now the second-most used language on the Internet after English. People use the Russian language on 5.9% of all websites, slightly ahead of German and far behind English (54.7%). Russian is used not only on 89.8% of .ru sites, but also on 88.7% of sites with the former Soviet Union domain .su. The websites of former Soviet Union nations also use high levels of Russian: 79.0% in Ukraine, 86.9% in Belarus, 84.0% in Kazakhstan, 79.6% in Uzbekistan, 75.9% in Kyrgyzstan and 81.8% in Tajikistan. However, Russian is the sixth-most used language on the top 1,000 sites, behind English language, English, Chinese language, Chinese, French language, French, German language, German, and Japanese language, Japanese.Dialects
Comparison with other Slavic languages
There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Russian, Belarusian language, Belarusian and Ukrainian language, Ukrainian, and a moderate degree of it across all modern Slavic languages, at least at the conversational level.Derived languages
* Balachka, a dialect spoken in Krasnodar region, Don, Kuban, and Terek River, Terek, brought by relocated Cossacks in 1793 and is based on the southwest Ukrainian dialect. During the Russification of the aforementioned regions in the 1920s to 1950s, it was replaced by the Russian language. * Fenya, a criminal argot of ancient origin, with Russian grammar, but with distinct vocabulary * Medny Aleut language, an extinct mixed language that was spoken on Bering Island and is characterized by its Aleut nouns and Russian verbs * Padonkaffsky jargon, a slang language developed by padonki of Runet * Quelia, a macaronic language with Russian-derived basic structure and part of the lexicon (mainly nouns and verbs) borrowed from German * Runglish, a Russian-English pidgin. This word is also used by English speakers to describe the way in which Russians attempt to speak English using Russian morphology and/or syntax. * Russenorsk language, Russenorsk, an extinct pidgin language with mostly Russian vocabulary and mostly Norwegian language, Norwegian grammar, used for communication between Russians and Norway, Norwegian traders in the Pomor trade in Finnmark and the Kola Peninsula *Surzhyk, a range of mixed (macaronic) sociolects of Ukrainian and Russian languages used in certain regions of Ukraine and adjacent lands. * Trasianka, a heavily russified variety of Belarusian language, Belarusian used by a large portion of the rural population in Belarus * Taimyr Pidgin Russian, spoken by the Nganasan people, Nganasan on the Taymyr Peninsula, Taimyr PeninsulaAlphabet
Transliteration
Because of many technical restrictions in computing and also because of the unavailability of Cyrillic keyboards abroad, Russian is often transliterated using the Latin alphabet. For example, ('frost') is transliterated ''moroz'', and ('mouse'), ''mysh'' or ''myš. Once commonly used by the majority of those living outside Russia, transliteration is being used less frequently by Russian-speaking typists in favor of the extension of Unicode character encoding, which fully incorporates the Russian alphabet. Free programs are available offering this Unicode extension, which allow users to type Russian characters, even on Western 'QWERTY' keyboards.Computing
The Russian alphabet has many systems of character encoding. KOI8-R was designed by the Soviet government and was intended to serve as the standard encoding. This encoding was and still is widely used in UNIX-like operating systems. Nevertheless, the spread of MS-DOS and OS/2 (Code page 866, IBM866), traditional Macintosh (ISO/IEC 8859-5) and Microsoft Windows (CP1251) meant the proliferation of many different encodings as de facto standards, with Windows-1251 becoming a de facto standard in Russian Internet and e-mail communication during the period of roughly 1995–2005. All the obsolete 8-bit encodings are rarely used in the communication protocols and text-exchange data formats, having been mostly replaced with UTF-8. A number of encoding conversion applications were developed. "iconv" is an example that is supported by most versions of Linux, Macintosh and some other operating systems; but converters are rarely needed unless accessing texts created more than a few years ago. In addition to the modern Russian alphabet, Unicode (and thus UTF-8) encodes the Early Cyrillic alphabet (which is very similar to the Greek alphabet), and all other Slavic and non-Slavic but Cyrillic-based alphabets.Orthography
The current spelling follows the major reform of 1918, and the final codification of 1956. An update proposed in the late 1990s has met a hostile reception, and has not been formally adopted. The punctuation, originally based on Byzantine Greek, was in the 17th and 18th centuries reformulated on the French and German models. According to the Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an optional acute accent () may, and sometimes should, be used to mark stress (linguistics), stress. For example, it is used to distinguish between otherwise identical words, especially when context does not make it obvious: (''zamók'' – "lock") – (''zámok'' – "castle"), (''stóyashchy'' – "worthwhile") – (''stoyáshchy'' – "standing"), (''chudnó'' – "this is odd") – (''chúdno'' – "this is marvellous"), (''molodéts'' – "well done!") – (''mólodets'' – "fine young man"), (''uznáyu'' – "I shall learn it") – (''uznayú'' – "I recognize it"), (''otrezát'' – "to be cutting") – (''otrézat'' – "to have cut"); to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words, especially personal and family names, like (''aféra'', "scandal, affair"), (''gúru'', "guru"), (''García''), (''Olésha''), (''Fermi''), and to show which is the stressed word in a sentence, for example (''Tý syel pechenye?'' – "Was it ''you'' who ate the cookie?") – (''Ty syél pechenye?'' – "Did you ''eat'' the cookie?) – (''Ty syel pechénye?'' "Was it the ''cookie'' you ate?"). Stress marks are mandatory in lexical dictionaries and books for children or Russian learners.Phonology
The phonological system of Russian is inherited from Common Slavonic; it underwent considerable modification in the early historical period before being largely settled around the year 1400. The language possesses five vowels (or six, under the St.Petersburg Phonological School), which are written with different letters depending on whether the preceding consonant is Palatalization (phonetics), palatalized. The consonants typically come in plain vs. palatalized pairs, which are traditionally called ''hard'' and ''soft.'' The hard consonants are often velarization, velarized, especially before front vowels, as in Irish phonology#Consonants, Irish and Marshallese language#Phonology, Marshallese. The standard language, based on the Moscow dialect, possesses heavy stress and moderate variation in pitch. Stressed vowels are somewhat lengthened, while unstressed vowels tend to be reduced to near-close vowels or an unclear schwa. (See also: vowel reduction in Russian.) The Russian syllable structure can be quite complex, with both initial and final consonant clusters of up to four consecutive sounds. Using a formula with V standing for the nucleus (vowel) and C for each consonant, the maximal structure can be described as follows: (C)(C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C) However, Russian has a constraint on syllabification such that syllables cannot span multiple morphemes. Clusters of four consonants are not very common, especially within a morpheme. Some examples are: ( ''vzglyad'', 'glance'), ( ''gosudarstv'', 'of the states'), ( ''stroitelstv'', 'of the constructions').Consonants
Russian is notable for its distinction based on Palatalization (phonetics), palatalization of most of its consonants. While do have palatalized allophones , only might be considered a phoneme, though it is marginal and generally not considered distinctive. The only native minimal pair that argues for being a separate phoneme is ( ''eto tkyot'' – "it weaves") (, ''etot kot'' – "this cat"). Palatalization means that the center of the tongue is raised during and after the articulation of the consonant. In the case of and , the tongue is raised enough to produce slight frication (affricate sounds; cf. Belarusian ць, дзь, or Polish ć, dź). The sounds are dental consonant, dental, that is, pronounced with the tip of the tongue against the teeth rather than against the alveolar ridge.Vowels
Grammar
Russian has preserved an Indo-European languages, Indo-European Synthetic language, synthetic-inflectional structure, although considerable Morphological levelling, levelling has occurred. Russian grammar encompasses: * a highly Fusional language, fusional morphology * a syntax that, for the literary language, is the conscious fusion of three elements: ** a polished vernacular foundation; ** a Church Slavonic language, Church Slavonic inheritance; ** a Western European style. The spoken language has been influenced by the literary one but continues to preserve characteristic forms. The dialects show various non-standard grammatical features, some of which are archaisms or descendants of old forms since discarded by the literary language. In terms of actual grammar, there are three tenses in Russian past, present, and future and each verb has two Grammatical aspect in Slavic languages, aspects (perfective and imperfective). Russian nouns each have a gender either feminine, masculine, or neuter, indicated by spelling at the end of the word. Words change depending on both their gender and function in the sentence. Russian has six Grammatical case, cases: Nominative (for the subject of the sentence), Accusative (for direct objects), Dative (for indirect objects), Genitive (to indicate possession), Instrumental (to indicate 'with' or 'by means of'), and Prepositional (used after a preposition). Verbs of motion in Russian such as 'go', 'walk', 'run', 'swim', and 'fly' use the imperfective or perfective form to indicate a single or return trip, and also use a multitude of prefixes to add more meaning to the verb.Vocabulary
History and examples
The history of the Russian language may be divided into the following periods: * History of the Russian language#Kievan period and feudal breakup, Kievan period and feudal breakup * Early Modern Russian, The Moscow period (15th–17th centuries) * Standard national language Judging by the historical records, by approximately 1000 AD the predominant ethnic group over much of modern European Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus was the Eastern branch of the Slavic peoples, Slavs, speaking a closely related group of dialects. The political unification of this region into Kievan Rus' in about 880, from which modern Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus trace their origins, established Old East Slavic as a literary and commercial language. It was soon followed by the adoption of Christianity in 988 and the introduction of the South Slavic Old Church Slavonic as the liturgical and official language. Borrowings and calques from Byzantine Greek began to enter the Old East Slavic and spoken dialects at this time, which in their turn modified the Old Church Slavonic as well.See also
* List of English words of Russian origin * List of Russian language topics * List of territorial entities where Russian is an official language * Computer RussificationNotes
References
Citations
Sources
; In English * M.A. O'Brien, New English–Russian and Russian–English Dictionary (New Orthography), New York, The Language Library 1944, Dover Publications. * * *External links
* * Oxford Dictionarie