Russian language

Russian language, principal state and cultural language of Russia. Together with Ukrainian and Belarusian, the Russian language makes up the eastern branch of the Slavic family of languages. Russian is the primary language of the overwhelming majority of people in Russia and is also used as a second language in other former republics of the Soviet Union. Russian was also taught extensively in those countries lying within the Soviet sphere of influence, especially in eastern Europe, in the second half of the 20th century.

Russian dialects are divided into the Northern group (stretching from St. Petersburg eastward across Siberia), the Southern group (in most of central and southern Russia), and the Central group (between Northern and Southern). Modern literary Russian is based on the Central dialect of Moscow, having basically the consonant system of the Northern dialect and the vowel system of the Southern dialect. The differences between these three dialects are fewer than between the dialects of most other European languages, however.

Russian and the other East Slavic languages (Ukrainian, Belarusian) did not diverge noticeably from one another until the Middle Russian period (the late 13th to the 16th century). The term Old Russian is generally applied to the common East Slavic language in use before that time.

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Russian has been strongly influenced by Old Church Slavonic and—since the 18th-century westernizing policies of Tsar Peter I the Great—by the languages of western Europe, from which it has borrowed many words. The 19th-century poet Aleksandr Pushkin had a very great influence on the subsequent development of the language. His writings, by combining the colloquial and Church Slavonic styles, put an end to the considerable controversy that had developed as to which style of the language was best for literary uses.

The modern language uses six case forms (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative) in the singular and plural of nouns and adjectives and expresses both a perfective aspect (completed action) and an imperfective aspect (process or incomplete action) in verbs. In its sound system the Russian language has numerous sibilant consonants and consonant clusters as well as a series of palatalized consonants contrasting with a series of unpalatalized (plain) consonants. (Palatalized consonants are those produced with simultaneous movement of the blade of the tongue toward or to the hard palate; they sound as if they have an accompanying y glide and are frequently known as soft consonants.) The reduced vowels ĭ and ŭ of the ancestral Slavic language were lost in Russian in weak position during the early historical period. Russian clause structure is basically subject–verb–object (SVO), but word order varies depending on which elements are already familiar in the discourse.