Russian language
East Slavic language / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Russian (Russian: русский язык, transliteration: russkiy yaz'ik) is a Slavic language. It is the main language spoken in Russia. It is also spoken by many people in other parts of the former Soviet Union, such as in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania, Turkmenistan and Estonia.
Russian | |
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russkiy yazyk | |
русский язык[1] | |
Pronunciation | [ˈruskʲɪj jɪˈzɨk] (listen) |
Native to | Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and other neighbouring Post-Soviet states |
Native speakers | 150 million (2010)[2] 260 million (L1 plus L2 speakers) (2012)[3] |
Early form | |
Cyrillic (Russian alphabet) Russian Braille | |
Official status | |
Official language in |
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Recognised minority language in | List
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Regulated by | Russian Language Institute[29] at the Russian Academy of Sciences |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-1 | ru |
ISO 639-2 | rus |
ISO 639-3 | rus |
Glottolog | russ1263 |
Linguasphere | 53-AAA-ea < 53-AAA-e |
Countries where Russian is an official language (dark blue) or spoken as a first or second language by greater than 30% of the population (teal) |
Russian, like other Slavic languages, is an Indo-European language. Russian is one of the three main East Slavic languages; the others are Ukrainian and Belarusian. More people speak Russian than any other Slavic language.
Written Russian does not use the Latin alphabet that English and the West Slavic languages do - some people do however, learn to write it in Latin letters. It mostly uses the Cyrillic alphabet, whose letters, like those of Latin, came from Greek, but are different from them. The other East Slavic languages and some of the South Slavic languages use the Cyrillic alphabet as well.
Russian is an official language of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, along with English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Chinese.