Russian language

The Russian language is the most geographically widespread one of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages. The Russian language belongs to the family of Indo-European ones and is one of three living members of the East Slavic languages, being Belarusian and Ukrainian (and possibly Rusyn, frequently considered a dialect of Ukrainian) the other ones.

Written samples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century onwards. The Russian language preserves much of East Slavonic grammar and a Common Slavonic word base, however, modern Russian exhibits a large amount of borrowed international vocabulary for science, technology and politics. Russian had great political importance in the 20th century because of the status of the Soviet Union a superpower. Consequently, Russian is still one of the official languages of the United Nations.

The Russian language has palatal secondary articulation of consonants, the so-called soft and hard sounds. Almost all consonant phonemes have this distinction and is one of the most important characteristics of the Russian language. The reduction of unstressed vowels is another important aspect, but this is not entirely unlike that of English. In general, stress in the Russian language is quite unpredictable and can be placed on almost any syllable. One of the most difficult aspects for foreign language learners is syllabic stress.

Classification of the Russian language

The Russian language is a Slavic one in the Indo-European family. From the point of view of the speaking, the Russian language is similar to Ukrainian and Belarusian, the other two national languages in the East Slavic group. Rusyn is also considered as an East Slavic language by some academics; others consider Rusyn just a dialect of Ukrainian.

Principles of word formation, the basic vocabulary and, to some extent, inflections and literary style of Russian have been also influenced by Church Slavonic, a developed and partly adopted form of the South Slavic Old Church Slavonic language used by the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1478, upon annexion of the Novgorod by Muscovy, Old-Novgorod dialect played an important role in formation of the modern Russian language, although it disappeared during 15–16 century. Modern Bulgarian language is very similar to the literary Russian, since they share around 60% vocabulary in fiction literature and up to 80% of the words used in journalistic genre, but there are important differences in grammar.

Nevertheless, the East Slavic forms have tended to remain in the different dialects that are passing through a rapid decline., Both the East Slavic and the Church Slavonic forms are in use in some cases, with slightly different meanings. Russian syntax and phonology (particularly in dialects of the North) have also been influenced to some extent by the numerous Finnic languages of the Finno-Ugric subfamily: Moksha, Muromian, Merya , the language of the Meshchera, Veps etc.
These languages used to be spoken right in the centre and in the north of what is now the European part of Russia, and some of them now have disappeared,. As far back as the early Middle Ages, they came in contact with Eastern Slavic and finally served as substratum for the modern Russian language.

The Russian dialects spoken in the North, North-east and North-west of Moscow have an important number of words of Finno-Ugric origin. Greek, Latin, French, German, and English have also greatly influenced the vocabulary and literary style of Russian . The modern Russian language also has many words adopted from Tatar and some other Turkic languages.

In terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers, Russian is classified as a level III language, according to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. The Russian language is believed to require about 780 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency. Due to both its difficulty to master for English speakers as well as due to its critical role in American foreign policy, the Russian language is also regarded by the United States Intelligence Community as a "hard target" language.

-Translation Russian-

Geographic distribution of the Russian language

The Russian language is mostly spoken in Russia and, to a lesser degree, the other nations that were once constituent republics of the USSR. The Russian language was the only official language of the Russian Empire, until 1917. The policy toward the languages of the different other ethnic groups fluctuated in practice during the Soviet period. The unifying role and superior status was reserved for Russian, although each of the constituent republics had its own official language. After the break-up of 1991, some of the newly independent nations have encouraged their native languages, which has partly reversed the privileged status of the Russian language, though its role as the one of post-Soviet national intercourse throughout the region has continued.

Particularly, in Latvia, the official recognition and legality in the classroom of the Russian language have been a topic of important debate in a country where more than one-third of the population speak Russian, who were principally of post-World War II immigrants from Russia and other parts of the former USSR (Ukraine, Belarus). Likewise, in Estonia, about one quarter of the country's current population are the Soviet-era immigrants and their Russian-speaking descendant.

In Lithuania, a much smaller Russian-speaking minority has principally been assimilated during the decade of independence and, nowadays, represent less than 1/10 of the country's overall population. However, about 80% of the population of the Baltic states can speak Russian in a conversational level and almost all know the most basic spoken and written phrases. The Russian control of Finland between 1809 and 1918, nevertheless, has left few Russian speakers to Finland. In Finland, there are 33,400 Russian speakers, being 0.6% of the population. 5000 (0.1%) of them immigrated to that country in the late 19th century and 20th century, and the rest are recent immigrants, having arrived in the 90's and later.

In the previous century, the Russian language was widely taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other nations that used to be satellites of the USSR. Particularly, these countries include Bulgaria, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Cuba, Hungary, Slovakia and Albania. Nevertheless, younger generations are not able to speak fluently the Russian language because it is no longer mandatory in the school system. The Russian language was, and to a lesser extent continues to be, widely taught in Asian countries such as Vietnam, Laos and Mongolia, as a consequence of the Soviet influence. Few tribes continues to use the Russian language as a lingua franca in Afghanistan . In the People's Republic of China before the Sino-Soviet Split, the Russian language was also taught as the mandatory foreign one requisite.

In Israel, at least 750,000 ethnic Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union (1999 census) can speak Russian. The Israeli websites and press frequently publish material in Russian.

Significant communities of speakers of the Russian language also exist in North America, particularly in large urban centres of the U.S. and Canada such as Baltimore, New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco Los Angeles, Toronto Seattle, Miami, Chicago, and the Cleveland suburb of Richmond Heights. There are over half a million in the former two Russian-speaking groups. In some places, these communities issue their own newspapers, and live in their self-sufficient neighbourhoods (in particular the generation of immigrants who arrived in the early sixties). Nevertheless, only around a quarter of them are ethnic Russians. 

The overwhelming majority of Russo phones in North America were Russian-speaking Jews before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Afterwards, due to the immigration from the nations of the former Soviet Union changed the statistics somewhat. The Russian language is the primary language spoken in the homes of over 700,000 individuals that live in the USA, according to the United States 2000 Census.

In Western Europe, there are considerable Russian-speaking groups. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, there have been several waves of immigrants. In total, there are about 3 million people in the United Kingdom, Spain, Belgium, Germany, , Brazil , France, Greece, Italy, and Turkey.

Two thirds of them are actually Russian-speaking descendants of Greeks, Jews, Germans, Ukrainians or Armenians who either are just looking for temporary employment or repatriated after the USSR collapsed.

Previously, by the third generation, the descendants of the Russian émigrés tended to lose the tongue of their ancestors . Today, the Russian language is likely to survive longer because the border is more open, , and mainly because a lot of the emigrants, at least once a year, visit their homelands and also have access to Russian websites and TV channels.