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Russian

ROO-skee yi-ZIK
Also Known As русский язык (russkiy yazyk)
Slavic Languages

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 2
Speaker Count
154,000,000 2
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 2
Region
Russia and the wider Russian-speaking world: former Soviet republics, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia; diaspora communities in North America and Israel 1
Classification
Official Status
Official Language 1
Russian
Filter Results2 entries
Connections

Ancestor Of

The Northern Russian dialect group is one of the two principal geographic dialect divisions of Russian.

Source Wikipedia: Russian Dialects

The Southern Russian dialect group is one of the two principal geographic dialect divisions of Russian.

Source Wikipedia: Russian Dialects

Associated With

Bulgarian, Languages

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)
Source Fundamentals of LanguageRoman Jakobson And Morris Halle

In Family

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica
Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)

Written In

Source Omniglot: The Online Encyclopedia of Writing Systems and Languages
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Russian Language
Wikipedia
  • infobox
    русский (russkiy)
  • lead section
    the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia
  • Pronunciation
    [ˈruskʲɪj jɪˈzɨk]
  • Official status, Russian entity page
    It has remained an official language of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, has constitutional status as the language of inter-ethnic communication in Tajikistan, and is still used as a lingua franca in Ukraine, Moldova, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and to a lesser extent in the Baltic states and Israel.
View the Source
2. Ethnologue: Languages of the World
SIL International, 2024View the Source
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language
David Crystal (editor), Cambridge University Press, 2010
Omniglot: The Online Encyclopedia of Writing Systems and Languages
Written In: Cyrillic ScriptView the Source
Fundamentals of Language
Roman Jakobson And Morris Halle, 1956Associated With: Roman Jakobson
Encyclopaedia Britannica
In Family: East SlavicView the Source
Wikipedia: Russian Dialects
Wikimedia Foundation
  • Ancestor Of: Southern Russian dialect, Dialect-division section (In Russia)
    Southern, in the western and southern parts of European Russia; this has various types of vowel reduction and fricative /gamma/; this group makes up a dialect continuum with Belarusian.
  • Ancestor Of: Northern Russian dialect, Dialect-division section (In Russia)
    Northern, in the northern and north-eastern parts of European Russia, from Veliky Novgorod to the Perm and northern Ural regions; this has no or little vowel reduction in unstressed positions and stop /g/.
View the Source
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