Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Russian language distinguishes itself through the distinction between soft and hard consonants. This palatalization is a fundamental structural element where almost every consonant has a soft counterpart. The tongue is raised toward the palate during articulation, creating friction that changes word meaning.
The current standard form of the Russian language arose at the beginning of the 18th century under the modernization reforms of Peter the Great. This standard developed from the Moscow dialect substratum which had a northern dialectal base. It was influenced by southern dialectal speakers after Moscow became the center of a unified state.
The modern literary language was established by the time of Alexander Pushkin in the first third of the 19th century. Pushkin rejected the archaic grammar and vocabulary of the high style in favor of the grammar and vocabulary found in the spoken language of the time. This decision set the standard for future writers including Mikhail Lermontov and Nikolai Gogol.
In 2010, there were 259.8 million speakers of the Russian language. This includes 137.5 million speakers in Russia and 93.7 million in the Commonwealth of Independent States and Baltic countries. Russian is the most spoken native language in Europe and the seventh-most spoken language by number of native speakers.
Russian has six cases for nouns, personal pronouns, and adjectives: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Instrumental, and Locative. The language features a highly inflectional fusional morphology that allows for an unusually flexible word order. Nouns and adjectives also have a gender, either feminine, masculine, or neuter, indicated by an inflection at the end of the word.
Northern Russian dialects typically pronounce unstressed vowels clearly in a phenomenon called okanye. Southern Russian dialects pronounce unstressed e following palatalized consonants in such positions, a phenomenon called yakanye. These dialectal variations preserve historical linguistic features that have been lost in the standard language.