Russianlanguage

The Russian language is an East Slavic language of the Indo-European family. It is the most widely spoken Slavic language and the largest native language in Europe, with around 150 million native speakers and over 260 million total speakers worldwide when including second-language speakers. It is the de facto national language of the Russian Federation and is widely used as a lingua franca in the former Soviet Union. It is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

Russian is written in the Cyrillic script, consisting of 33 letters. The standard form is based on the Moscow literary tradition, though regional varieties exist. The language features a rich inflectional system with six grammatical cases and three genders. Verbs express aspect (perfective vs. imperfective) and are conjugated for person and number, with a range of tenses and moods. Word order is relatively flexible, but the typical basic order in statements is subject–verb–object, with syntactic meaning often determined by inflection, rather than position alone.

Dialectal variation is substantial but mutually intelligible to a large extent among speakers of standard Russian. Major dialect groups include Northern, Central, and Southern varieties, with differences in phonology, vocabulary, and some grammatical features.

Historically, Russian evolved from Old East Slavic with Church Slavonic influence, undergoing significant standardization in the 18th and 19th centuries. It has a rich literary and cultural heritage and remains a primary medium of education, media, science, administration, and culture in Russia, as well as widely spoken across many countries in Europe and Asia due to historical migration and governance.