Russian Language: A Brief Overview

Linguistic Features:

• Language Family: Indo-European → Balto-Slavic → Slavic → East Slavic
• Alphabet: Cyrillic script (33 letters)
• Grammar: Highly inflected with six grammatical cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, prepositional)
• Phonetics: Distinctive soft and hard consonants, vowel reduction, and variable word stress

Geographical Distribution:

• Official Status: Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan
• Widely Spoken In: Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan
• Diaspora: Significant Russian-speaking communities in the U.S., Canada, Israel, Germany, and other countries

Demographics:

• Total Speakers: Over 250 million worldwide
• Native Speakers: Approximately 160 million
• Second Language: Widely spoken as a second language in post-Soviet countries
• UN Official Language: One of the six official languages of the United Nations

Russian is the most spoken Slavic language and remains a key language in international diplomacy, science, and literature.