Russian is a Slavic language with over 250 million speakers worldwide. It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet and related to other Slavic languages. It is the official language of several countries and one of the working languages of the UN. Russian literature is highly regarded, but the language is difficult for English speakers to learn.
Russian is a Slavic language spoken widely throughout Europe and Asia, with over 250 million speakers worldwide. It is the eighth most spoken language in the world and one of the most spoken languages in all of Eurasia. It is written with a version of the Cyrillic alphabet. The alphabet contains 8 letters and sometimes had more.
This language is related to other Slavic languages such as Czech, Slovak, Polish, Ukrainian, Slovenian and Bulgarian. It is most closely related to the other East Slavic languages, of which the most widely spoken are Belarusian, Ukrainian and Rusyn. Russian is the official language of Abkhazia, Belarus, Gagauzia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Transnistria. It is also one of the working languages of the United Nations.
The language’s predecessor began to emerge sometime after the 1st millennium, drawing influences from the surrounding Slavic languages to form what eventually became modern Russian. Old Church Slavonic, an important language among Christians of this era, contributed much to what was to become the Russian language, as did loanwords from Greek in this early period. As Peter the Great embarked on his powerful campaign to Westernize Russia, he also set the stage for a massive influx of European vocabulary to describe technologies and concepts for which the language had no terms at the time. French during this period was, as in most of Europe at the same time, regarded as the language of the literati and a number of French words found their way into the language via the literati.
There are sizable communities speaking this language scattered around the world, in the wake of a series of great migrations. In the United States, there are reportedly over four million Russian speakers; in Israel there are nearly a million; and in all of Western Europe there are more than three million.
To cover such a large landmass, the language is surprisingly uniform. While there are distinct dialects throughout Russia and Russian-speaking countries, they are essentially all mutually intelligible. When compared to other regions of a comparable size, this is almost unheard of. Much of this is due to a concerted effort by government throughout the 20th century to normalize speech patterns, grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation.
Russian is widely considered one of the best languages in the world for literature, accompanying English, French and German, among others. Novelists who write in the language are often hailed as the greatest writers of epic short stories, with Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekov and Dostoyevsky among the most famous authors.
Russian is a very difficult language for English speakers to learn, being classified as a Class III language, on a par with struggling Arabic or Mandarin. Its diverse alphabet, use of many sounds that seem foreign to English speakers, and considerably different grammar all contribute to making it much more difficult to acquire than Germanic or Romance languages.
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