Russian is a language of the East-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. Russian is closely related to Belorussian, Ukrainian and Rusyn/Ruthenian.
With approximately 280 million speakers, circa 160 of whom speak it as their mother tongue, Russian is the largest language of Europe and it is considered as one of the global languages. It forms the lingua franca in the post-Soviet region and has the role of an official language in several countries:
In many Oblasts (districts) of southeastern Ukraine, Russian is a regional official language, although this status is politically controversial. Also in Tajikistan Russian has an official status. It is also one of the official languages of the seperatist regions of Transdniestria (together with Ukrainian and Moldovan/Romanian), South Ossetia (with Ossetian) and Abchasia (with Abkhaz).
By roughly classifying the Russian dialects of the main area (i.e. European Russia), two main zones can be distinguished: one zone north and one zone south of Moscow. The Russian language standard is based on the central Russian dialects of the region around Moscow.
Russian is written in the Russian or Cyrillic alphabet, which is based on the old-Cyrillic alphabet.
Hello - привет
You are not alone - ТЫ НЕ ОДИН
A particularity of Russian verbs is the fact that they have two different forms to indicate whether something has already been finalised or not. In linguistics, this grammatical category is called “aspect”.
Russians in Poland (15.000 Speaker)
Russians in Moldova (562.000 Speaker)
Russians in Lithuania (300.000 Speaker)
Russians in Estonia (410.000 Speaker)
Russians in Armenia (14.800 Speaker)
Russians in Latvia (796.000 Speaker)
Russians in Ukraine (11.356.000 Speaker)
Russians / Lipovans in Romania (36.000 Speaker)
Russians in Czech Republic (5.000 Speaker)
Russians in Belarus (1.105.000 Speaker)
Russians in Finland (20.000 Speaker)
Russia (92.934.500 Speaker)