Russian language

East Slavic language spoken by about 170 million people in Russia, former republics of the Soviet Union, and émigré communities.

For many non-Russian ethnic groups both within and outside contemporary Russia, it is a common second language and lingua franca. Since the Middle Ages, Russian has gradually expanded its speech area from its historical locus in the upper Volga and Dnieper River drainages northward and eastward. Russian speakers penetrated Siberia in the 16th century and reached the Pacific in the 17th century. Russian became a full-fledged literary language in the 18th century, when it finally displaced Church Slavonic (see Old Church Slavonic language). Dialect differences in Russian are not great, considering the enormous territory over which it is spoken, and the upheavals of the 20th century eroded such distinctions as exist.

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Russian  Russki Yazyk 

      principal state and cultural language of Russia. Together with Ukrainian and Belarusian, the Russian language makes up the eastern branch of the Slavic family of languages. Russian is the primary language of the overwhelming majority of people in Russia and is also used as a second language in other former republics of the Soviet Union. Russian was also taught extensively in those countries lying within the Soviet sphere of influence, especially in eastern Europe, in the second half of the 20th century.

      Russian dialects are divided into the Northern group (stretching from St. Petersburg eastward across Siberia), the Southern group (in most of central and southern Russia), and the Central group (between Northern and Southern). Modern literary Russian is based on the Central dialect of Moscow, having basically the consonant system of the Northern dialect and the vowel system of the Southern dialect. The differences between these three dialects are fewer than between the dialects of most other European languages, however.

      Russian and the other East Slavic languages (Ukrainian, Belarusian) did not diverge noticeably from one another until the Middle Russian period (the late 13th to the 16th century). The term Old Russian is generally applied to the common East Slavic language in use before that time.

      Russian has been strongly influenced by Church Slavonic and, since the 18th-century westernizing policies of Tsar Peter I the Great, by the languages of western Europe, from which it has borrowed many words. The 19th-century poet Aleksandr Pushkin (Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich) had a very great influence on the subsequent development of the language. His writings, by combining the colloquial and Church Slavonic styles, put an end to the considerable controversy that had developed as to which style of the language was best for literary uses.

      The modern language uses six case forms (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative) in the singular and plural of nouns and adjectives and expresses both a perfective aspect (completed action) and an imperfective aspect (process or incomplete action) in verbs. In its sound system the Russian language has numerous sibilant consonants and consonant clusters, as well as a series of palatalized consonants contrasting with a series of unpalatalized (plain) consonants. (Palatalized consonants are those produced with simultaneous movement of the blade of the tongue toward or to the hard palate; they sound as if they have an accompanying y glide and are frequently known as soft consonants.) The reduced vowels ĭ and ŭ of the ancestral Slavic language were lost in Russian in weak position during the early historical period. Russian clause structure is basically subject–verb–object (SVO), but word order varies depending on which elements are already familiar in the discourse.

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