Russian Language

Russian (pусский язык) belongs to the East Slavic group of the Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is the largest of the Slavic languages. Its closest relatives are Belarusian and Ukrainian. Russian is primarily spoken in the Russian Federation and by older people in the other countries that were once part of the Soviet Union, as well as in Eastern Europe. According to the 2010 census, there were 137 million speakers of Russian in the Russian Federation, and 166 million worldwide (Ethnologue). In addition, Russian is spoken in Canada, China, Finland, Germany, Greece, India, Israel, and the U.S. It is one of the world’s ten most spoken languages.

Prior to the 14th century, ancestors of the modern Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians spoke varieties of Old East Slavic, a language that was common to all three. Linguists think that it split into what are now Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian at the end of the 14th century. Until the end of the 17th century, the official language in Russia was an East Slavic version of Church Slavonic, the liturgical language of the Russian Orthodox Church. The political reforms of Peter the Great in the 18th century included a reform of the Russian alphabet and westernization of the language through numerous borrowings from Western European languages. This resulted in a move away from Church Slavonic norms towards spoken norms.