Russian language

• 1. Origins And Evolution

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  The Ostromir Gospels of 1056 stand as one of the oldest East Slavic books known today. This manuscript preserves a form of language that would eventually evolve into modern Russian. The emergence of writing in this region dates to around the year 1000 after Old Church Slavonic was introduced as the liturgical language. At that time, the two languages were mutually intelligible yet distinct in their forms. The vernacular was considered the low variety while Church Slavonic held the high variety status. Birch bark manuscripts from the 11th through 15th centuries offer the closest approximation to the actual spoken Old Russian language. Feudal divisions and conflicts created obstacles between the Russian principalities before and especially during Mongol rule. These political fractures strengthened dialectal differences for a long period. A unified state did not emerge until the 15th and 16th centuries when Moscow began its rise as the political center. The formation of this centralized state created an obvious practical problem regarding communication in administrative affairs. The initial impulse for standardization came from government bureaucracy seeking reliable tools for legal and judicial work. Early attempts at standardizing Russian relied on the so-called Moscow official or chancery language during the 15th to 17th centuries. The current standard form arose at the beginning of the 18th century with the modernization reforms under Peter the Great. This new standard developed from the Moscow dialect substratum under some influence of the Russian chancery language. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, the spoken form belonged to the nobility and urban bourgeoisie. Peasants continued speaking in their own dialects without systematic study by philologists.

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• 2. Geographic Distribution

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  In 2010 there were 259.8 million speakers of Russian in the world according to census data. Russia itself contained 137.5 million speakers while the CIS and Baltic countries held 93.7 million. Eastern Europe accounted for 12.9 million speakers and Western Europe had 7.3 million. Asia hosted 2.7 million speakers and the Middle East and North Africa region contained 1.3 million. Sub-Saharan Africa had only 0.1 million speakers while Latin America held 0.2 million. The United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand together supported 4.1 million speakers. Belarus maintains Russian as a second state language alongside Belarusian per its Constitution. Seventy-seven percent of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006 and 67% used it as the main language at home or work. Estonia saw Russian spoken by 29.6% of the population according to a 2011 estimate from the World Factbook. Latvia reported that 55% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006 with 26% using it as their main language. Ukraine contains 14,400,000 native speakers and 29 million active speakers according to Demoskop Weekly estimates from 2004. Sixty-five percent of the Ukrainian population was fluent in Russian in 2006 and 38% used it as their primary language. Kazakhstan reported that 10,309,500 people could read and write well in Russian according to the 2009 census. This represented 84.8% of the population aged 15 and above who understood the spoken language. Israel hosts around 1.5 million speakers which equals approximately 15% of its total population.

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• 3. Linguistic Structure

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  Russian is written using a Cyrillic alphabet consisting of exactly 33 letters. The early Cyrillic alphabet was adapted from Old Church Slavonic for use in Russia. The first attempt at reforming Russian orthography occurred between 1708 and 1710 while the last major reform took place during 1917 and 1918. The language distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without. Almost every consonant has hard-soft counterparts shown in writing by changing the following vowel rather than the consonant itself. Unstressed vowels undergo reduction where five or six vowels merge into only two to four sounds depending on context. Stress often remains unpredictable and is not normally indicated orthographically though an optional acute accent may mark it. An example appears in the word zamók meaning lock versus zámok meaning castle. Russian functions as a typical fusional language where a single inflectional morpheme denotes multiple grammatical features simultaneously. Prefixes and suffixes actively form words more extensively than most other Slavic languages. Word compounding including open compounding occurs more frequently than in Czech or Ukrainian. A syllable structure can contain up to four consecutive initial consonants followed by a nucleus and up to four final consonants. Verbs of motion such as go, walk, run, swim, and fly use imperfective or perfective forms to indicate trips.

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• 4. Political History

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  The political reforms of Peter the Great were accompanied by a reform of the alphabet achieving secularization and modernization goals. Mikhail Lomonosov defined three styles in his 1755 Russian Grammar: high style for religious texts, middle style for literary prose, and low style for personal correspondence. The modern standard language aligns closest to the middle style described by Lomonosov. During the Soviet period policy toward ethnic group languages fluctuated while Russian retained unifying role status. Each constituent republic had its own official language yet Russian held superior status throughout the union. It was declared the official language only in 1990 according to the USSR Law about the Languages of the USSR. Following the break-up of the USSR in 1991 several newly independent states encouraged their native languages. This partly reversed the privileged status of Russian though it remained the language of post-Soviet national discourse. In Ukraine a new education law passed on the 5th of September 2017 requiring all schools to teach at least partially in Ukrainian. The 2019 Law of Ukraine On protecting the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the state language gives priority to Ukrainian in over 30 spheres of public life. A poll conducted in March 2022 found that 83% of respondents believe Ukrainian should be the only state language. Support for granting Russian state language status dropped from nearly one quarter before the war to just 7% after invasion began.

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• 5. Global Influence

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  Russian serves as one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station alongside English. NASA astronauts who serve with Russian cosmonauts usually take Russian language courses starting from the Apollo-Soyuz mission which first flew in 1975. The language holds status as one of six official languages of the United Nations and appears in organizations like UNESCO and the World Health Organization. In March 2013 research found Russian to be the second-most used language on websites after English. It represented 5.9% of all websites slightly ahead of German but far behind English which dominated 54.7%. Websites in former Soviet Union member states showed high levels of usage including 86.9% in Belarus and 84.0% in Kazakhstan. On the 13th of October 2023 the CIS Council of Heads of State signed a Treaty establishing an International Organization for the Russian Language. This treaty adopted statements supporting Russian as a language of interethnic communication. The language was also the most widely taught foreign language in Mongolia during 2005 and became compulsory in Year 7 onward as a second foreign language in 2006. Vietnam added Russian to its elementary curriculum along with Chinese and Japanese naming them first foreign languages for students.

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