Languages

Russian

ROO-skee yi-ZIK

Also Known As русский язык (russkiy yazyk)

Citation Formats

General Reference

Language Atlas. "Russian." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://language.interactiveatlas.org/languages/russian.

APA Style

Language Atlas. (n.d.). Russian. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://language.interactiveatlas.org/languages/russian

BibTeX

@misc{languageatlas-russian,
  author = {Language Atlas},
  title = {Russian},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://language.interactiveatlas.org/languages/russian},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Russian is an East Slavic language and the most widely spoken Slavic language, serving as the primary language of Russia and a widely used second language across much of the former Soviet Union. It is written in a Cyrillic alphabet distinct in some letterforms from Bulgarian, reflecting reforms carried out under Peter the Great and again after the 1917 revolution.

Facts

ISO 639-3 Code

ru 1

Speaker Count

154,000,000 1

Figure is for first-language speakers. Ethnologues total figure including second-language speakers across the former Soviet Union runs well over 250 million; sources differ on how many former-Soviet second-language speakers to count as fluent.

Status

Living 1

Region

Russia and the wider Russian-speaking world: former Soviet republics, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia; diaspora communities in North America and Israel 2

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Bulgarian

This source names Bulgarian directly: "distinct in some letterforms from Bulgarian, reflecting reforms carried out under Peter the Great and again after the 1917 revolution."

Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)

Roman Jakobson

Source Fundamentals of LanguageRoman Jakobson And Morris Halle