Russian language

• 1. Introduction

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  Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, carried from Brighton Beach in Brooklyn to the International Space Station orbiting overhead. It is one of only two languages spoken aboard that station, a practice that traces back to the Apollo-Soyuz mission first flown in 1975. With more than 210 million total speakers, it ranks as the most spoken native language in Europe and the most spoken Slavic language. Yet its story is not a simple one of growth. By the assessment published in 2012, the share of Russian speakers in the world had been falling for decades, from a high after the Soviet Union toward a lower figure by 2020. How did one tongue come to stretch across so many borders, governments, and even into orbit? And why, at the same time, is it slipping in so many of the places it once dominated? The answers run through palatalized consonants, a poet who threw out the old grammar, and a string of national laws written long after the fact.

• 2. Soft And Hard

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  Almost every consonant in Russian comes in a pair, one "soft" and one "hard," a distinction based on palatalization that runs through nearly the whole sound system. Soft consonants are produced by raising the center of the tongue toward the palate during and after the consonant. The contrast is so central that writing usually marks it not on the consonant itself but on the vowel that follows. According to some linguists, the plain consonants are velarized as in Irish, most noticeable in a labial before a hard vowel. Stress in Russian is often unpredictable and is not normally shown in writing. An optional acute accent, the знак ударения, can mark it when needed. The same string of letters can mean two different things depending on where the stress falls: замо́к is a lock, while за́мок is a castle. The Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Science notes that this accent can separate сто́ящий, meaning worthwhile, from стоя́щий, meaning standing. Such stress marks are mandatory in lexical dictionaries and in books for children or Russian learners. The sound system reaches its full complexity in the syllable. Russian permits consonant clusters of up to four consecutive sounds at both the start and the end of a syllable. In stressed syllables there are five or six vowels, but when unstressed many of these merge down to as few as two. Northern dialects along the Volga keep unstressed /o/ clear, a phenomenon called okanye. In the south, unstressed vowels after palatalized consonants shift toward a, a feature called yakanye that immediately marks a speaker's region.

• 3. Words Built And Borrowed

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  'Railroad' in Russian is two words, железная дорога, where Czech compresses the same idea into one, železnice. Russian uses word compounding, including open compounding, more than most other Slavic languages. It is a typical fusional language, where a single ending can carry several grammatical features at once. Beyond inflection it leans heavily on prefixes and suffixes for building new words, again more than its Slavic relatives. The lexicon is layered with centuries of borrowing. Church Slavonic, used as a literary language in the medieval period, brought in a large number of borrowings and calques ultimately derived from Greek. Over the centuries, Western and Central European languages added their weight, including Greek, Latin, Polish, Dutch, German, French, Italian, and English. To the south and east, Uralic, Turkic, Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew left smaller traces. The sheer scale of the vocabulary shows in the dictionaries. Dahl's Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language, compiled in 1880 to 1882, ran to 195,844 words and tried to catalogue the full vernacular. By the 11th of October 2021, the Russian Wiktionary listed 442,533 entries in its Russian-language category. For a native English speaker, the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, classifies Russian as a level III language, requiring roughly 1,100 hours of immersion instruction to reach intermediate fluency.

• 4. Forging A Standard

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  Feudal divisions and Mongol rule once kept the Russian principalities apart, hardening dialect differences and delaying any single national language. When a unified, centralized Russian state formed in the 15th and 16th centuries, the government bureaucracy felt the lack of a reliable tool for administrative, legal, and judicial affairs. The earliest standardization attempts leaned on the Moscow chancery language. But the church's use of Church Slavonic kept Russian in a secondary status for generations. Peter the Great changed the balance at the start of the 18th century. He regarded standardizing Russian as essential to a modern system of government, education, and science, and by the early 1700s Russian had replaced Church Slavonic in secular matters. The work of building a literary language fell to a new generation of intellectuals. Mikhail Lomonosov authored the first scientific grammar of Russian and devised a theoretical system of stylistic registers. In his Russian Grammar of 1755 he defined three styles: a high style of Church Slavonic, a middle style for lyric poetry and scientific work, and a low style of pure vernacular for personal letters and low comedy. The spoken language of this era belonged to the nobility and the urban bourgeoisie. Russian peasants, the great majority, kept speaking their own dialects, which philologists treated as mere folklore. The dialectologist Nikolai Karinsky admitted late in life that scholars had mostly studied phonetics and morphology, with almost no work on the lexicon or syntax of Russian dialects. After 1917, Marxist linguists dismissed peasant speech as a relic of a disappearing past. Writing in 1930, the Soviet academicians A. M. Ivanov and L. P. Yakubinsky predicted that heavy industry would level local dialects into a new general language of the working class.

• 5. Pushkin's Break

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  Alexander Pushkin settled what reform and bureaucracy had only begun, and the modern literary language was established in the first third of the 19th century. He rejected the archaic grammar and vocabulary of the high style in favor of the grammar and vocabulary of the spoken language of his day. The effect lasted. Even young modern readers face only slight difficulty with some of Pushkin's words, since few have become archaic or shifted meaning. Many phrases from the writers of the early 1800s passed straight into everyday speech. Expressions from Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Gogol, and Aleksander Griboyedov became proverbs still heard in modern colloquial Russian. Pushkin's poem Зимний вечер, or Winter evening, opens with a storm that covers the sky with a haze, then howls like a beast, then cries like a child at the window. The written word itself had to be reshaped to fit this new closeness to speech. The first attempt at reforming Russian orthography came in 1708 to 1710, paired with Peter the Great's alphabet reform. The last major reform followed in 1917 to 1918. The modern alphabet has 33 letters, adapted from Old Church Slavonic, and has shed older letters such as yat. The polish of the literary language sat atop a striking social fact: by 1800, much of the gentry spoke French daily. In Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, entire pages run in French with no translation, on the assumption that educated readers would not need one.

• 6. Maps Of Influence

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  In 2010 there were 259.8 million speakers of Russian worldwide, with 137.5 million inside Russia and 93.7 million across the CIS and Baltic countries. That total placed Russian seventh in the world by number of speakers, after English, Mandarin, Hindi-Urdu, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Portuguese. It remains an official language of the Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. In Belarus, Russian is a second state language alongside Belarusian under the constitution. The 2019 census found 6,718,557 people, 71.4% of the population, speaking Russian at home, a share that rises to 97.2% among ethnic Russians. In Kazakhstan, the 2009 census reported that 84.8% of the population aged 15 and above could read, write, and understand Russian. In Kyrgyzstan it is a co-official language, with 49.6% of those aged 15 and above speaking it fluently as a second language. The Baltic states have moved the other way. On the 18th of February 2012, Latvia held a referendum on adopting Russian as a second official language, and 74.8% voted against. In Estonia, where Russian is officially a foreign language spoken by 29.6% of the population, parliament approved a bill in 2022 to close Russian-language schools, with the transition starting in the 2024-2025 school year. Far from these political battles, the language clings on in unexpected pockets. In Nikolaevsk, Alaska, settled after Russian explorers reached the territory in the 18th century, Russian is more spoken than English to this day.

• 7. A Tongue In Decline

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  Almost a quarter of Ukrainians once favored making Russian a state language, but after the 2022 Russian invasion that support dropped to just 7%. According to a RATING poll in March 2022-83% of respondents in the territory controlled by Ukraine believed Ukrainian should be the country's only state language. By August 2023, nearly 60% usually spoke Ukrainian at home and only 9% spoke Russian. Demoskop Weekly had estimated 14,400,000 native Russian speakers in Ukraine back in 2004. The retreat is measurable far beyond any single country. According to figures published in 2006 by A. L. Arefyev, research deputy director at the Ministry of Education and Science, Russian was gradually losing its position in the world. His 2012 study, Russian language at the turn of the 20th-21st centuries, confirmed a weakening trend after the Soviet collapse. His assessment traced the share of Russian speakers in world population from 7.9% in 1914 down to 3.3% by 2020. In the former Soviet states, Russian was being replaced or used in conjunction with local languages. The language is still being defended on paper even as everyday use shifts. On the 13th of October 2023, the CIS Council of Heads of State signed the Treaty on the Establishment of the International Organization for the Russian Language. It also adopted a statement supporting Russian as a language of interethnic communication. On that same theme, Moldova's Constitutional Court had moved the opposite way on the 21st of January 2021, stripping Russian of its status as the language of interethnic communication and declaring the Soviet-era law unconstitutional.