From WikiLang
 Russian pages
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| Introduction · Adpositions · Gender · Lexicon · Pronouns · Sounds and Writing |
| Slavic Languages | |
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| Eastern Slavic |  Belarusian · Russian ·  Ukrainian
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| Southern Slavic |  Bulgarian ·  Macedonian ·  Old Church Slavonic ·  Serbo-Croatian ( Bosnian  Croatian  Montenegrin Serbian) ·  Slovene
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| Western Slavic |  Czech ·  Kashubian ·  Polish ·  Silesian ·  Slovak ·  Lower Sorbian ·  Upper Sorbian
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Contents |
An Introduction to the Language
Russian is one of the most widely spoken native languages in Europe. It belongs to the Slavic group of the Indo-European language family. The Slavic group of languages is divided into West Slavic (Czech, Slovak, Polish, and Sorbian), South Slavic (Bulgarian, Croatian, Macedonian, Serbian, and Slovenian), and East Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian).
Russian is one of the five official languages of the United Nations, and ranks as the major world language along with Chinese, English, Spanish and Hindi. It is the native language of 142 million citizens of the Russian Federation, the world's largest country.
The geographical spread of the Russian language goes far beyond Russia, as it is spoken (or at least understood) in many countries of the former USSR and it remains the key language across all of the Caucasus and Central Asia. The total number of Russian language speakers around the world is estimated to be from 255 to 285 million.
Russian has proven to be a popular language of study both because of its international prominence and its famous literature works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov, and other famous writers.★From: 1
Family
Indo-European
- Balto-Slavic
- Slavic
- East Slavic
- Russian
- East Slavic
- Slavic
Spoken in
Spoken by over 250 million speakers in Russia and the surrounding former-soviet states.
