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Russian language
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Russian ( (•), transliteration: , ) is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of three (or, according to some authorities , four) living members of the East Slavic languages, the others being Belarusian and Ukrainian (and possibly Rusyn, often considered a dialect of Ukrainian). It is also spoken by the countries of the Russophone.
Written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century onwards. Today Russian is widely used outside Russia. It is applied as a means of coding and storage of universal knowledge — 60–70% of all world information is published in English and Russian languages.
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Russian ( (•), transliteration: , ) is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of three (or, according to some authorities , four) living members of the East Slavic languages, the others being Belarusian and Ukrainian (and possibly Rusyn, often considered a dialect of Ukrainian). It is also spoken by the countries of the Russophone.
Written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century onwards. Today Russian is widely used outside Russia. It is applied as a means of coding and storage of universal knowledge — 60–70% of all world information is published in English and Russian languages. Over a quarter of the world's scientific literature is published in Russian. Russian is also a necessary accessory of world communications systems (broadcasts, air- and space communication, etc). Due to the status of the Soviet Union as a superpower, Russian had great political importance in the 20th century. Hence, the language is one of the official languages of the United Nations.
Russian distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called soft and hard sounds. This distinction is found between pairs of almost all consonants and is one of the most distinguishing features of the language. Another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels, which is somewhat similar to that of English. Stress, which is unpredictable, is not normally indicated orthographically. According to the Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an optional acute accent () may, and sometimes should, be used to mark stress. For example, it is used to distinguish between otherwise identical words, especially when context doesn't make it obvious: ????´?/??´??? (lock/castle), ???´????/????´??? (worthwhile/standing), ?????´/??´??? (this is odd/this is marvellous), ??????´?/??´????? (attaboy/fine young man), ????´?/?????´ (I shall learn it/I am learning it), ??????´??/????´???? (infinitive for "cut"/perfective for "cut"); to indicate the proper pronouncation of uncommon words, especially personal and family names (???´??, ??´??, ?????´?, ???´??, ??´???), and to express the stressed word in the sentence (??´ ???? ????????/?? ???´? ????????/?? ???? ????´???? - Was it you who eat the cookie?/Did you eat the cookie?/Was the cookie your meal?). Acute accents are mandatory in lexical dictionaries and books intended to be used either by children or foreign readers.
ClassificationRussian is a Slavic language in the Indo-European family. From the point of view of the spoken language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian and Belarusian, the other two national languages in the East Slavic group. In many places in eastern Ukraine and Belarus, these languages are spoken interchangeably, and in certain areas traditional bilingualism resulted in language mixture, e.g. Surzhyk in eastern Ukraine and Trasianka in Belarus. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect, although vanished during the fifteenth or sixteenth century, is sometimes considered to have played a significant role in formation of the modern Russian language.
The vocabulary (mainly abstract and literary words), principles of word formation, and, to some extent, inflections and literary style of Russian have been also influenced by Church Slavonic, a developed and partly adopted form of the South Slavic Old Church Slavonic language used by the Russian Orthodox Church. However, the East Slavic forms have tended to be used exclusively in the various dialects that are experiencing a rapid decline. In some cases, both the East Slavic and the Church Slavonic forms are in use, with slightly different meanings. For details, see Russian phonology and History of the Russian language.
Russian phonology and syntax (especially in northern dialects) have also been influenced to some extent by the numerous Finnic languages of the Finno-Ugric subfamily: Merya, Moksha, Muromian, the language of the Meshchera, Veps, et cetera. These languages, some of them now extinct, used to be spoken in the center and in the north of what is now the European part of Russia. They came in contact with Eastern Slavic as far back as the early Middle Ages and eventually served as substratum for the modern Russian language. The Russian dialects spoken north, north-east and north-west of Moscow have a considerable number of words of Finno-Ugric origin. Over the course of centuries, the vocabulary and literary style of Russian have also been influenced by Turkic/Caucasian/Central Asian languages, as well as Western/Central European languages such as Polish, Latin, Dutch, German, French, and English.
According to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, Russian is classified as a level III language in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers, requiring approximately 780 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency. It is also regarded by the United States Intelligence Community as a "hard target" language, due to both its difficulty to master for English speakers as well as due to its critical role in American world policy.
Geographic distributionRussian is primarily spoken in Russia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics of the USSR. Until 1917, it was the sole official language of the Russian Empire. During the Soviet period, the policy toward the languages of the various other ethnic groups fluctuated in practice. Though each of the constituent republics had its own official language, the unifying role and superior status was reserved for Russian. Following the break-up of 1991, several of the newly independent states have encouraged their native languages, which has partly reversed the privileged status of Russian, though its role as the language of post-Soviet national intercourse throughout the region has continued.
In Latvia, notably, its official recognition and legality in the classroom have been a topic of considerable debate in a country where more than one-third of the population is Russian-speaking, consisting mostly of post-World War II immigrants from Russia and other parts of the former USSR (Belarus, Ukraine). Similarly, in Estonia, the Soviet-era immigrants and their Russian-speaking descendants constitute 25,6% of the country's current population and 58,6% of the native Estonian population is also able to speak Russian. In all, 67,8% of Estonia's population can speak Russian.
In Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, Russian remains a co-official language with Kazakh and Kyrgyz respectively. Large Russian-speaking communities still exist in northern Kazakhstan, and ethnic Russians comprise 25.6 % of Kazakhstan's population.
A much smaller Russian-speaking minority in Lithuania has represented less than 1/10 of the country's overall population. Nevertheless more than half of the population of the Baltic states are able to hold a conversation in Russian and almost all have at least some familiarity with the most basic spoken and written phrases. The Russian control of Finland in 1809–1918, however, has left few Russian speakers in Finland. There are 33,400 Russian speakers in Finland, amounting to 0.6% of the population. 5000 (0.1%) of them are late 19th century and 20th century immigrants, and the rest are recent immigrants, who have arrived in the 90's and later.
In the twentieth century, Russian was widely taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other countries that used to be allies of the USSR. In particular, these countries include Poland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Albania and Cuba. However, younger generations are usually not fluent in it, because Russian is no longer mandatory in the school system. It is currently the most widely-taught foreign language in Mongolia.
Russian is also spoken in Israel by at least 750,000 ethnic Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union (1999 census). The Israeli press and websites regularly publish material in Russian.
Sizable Russian-speaking communities also exist in North America, especially in large urban centers of the U.S. and Canada such as New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Baltimore, Miami, Chicago, Denver, and the Cleveland suburb of Richmond Heights. In the former two, Russian-speaking groups total over half a million. In a number of locations they issue their own newspapers, and live in their self-sufficient neighborhoods (especially the generation of immigrants who started arriving in the early sixties). Only about a quarter of them are ethnic Russians, however. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the overwhelming majority of Russophones in North America were Russian-speaking Jews. Afterwards the influx from the countries of the former Soviet Union changed the statistics somewhat. According to the United States 2000 Census, Russian is the primary language spoken in the homes of over 700,000 individuals living in the United States.
Significant Russian-speaking groups also exist in Western Europe. These have been fed by several waves of immigrants since the beginning of the twentieth century, each with its own flavor of language. Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Brazil, Norway, Austria, and Turkey have significant Russian-speaking communities totaling 3 million people.
Two thirds of them are actually Russian-speaking descendants of Germans, Greeks, Jews, Armenians, or Ukrainians who either repatriated after the USSR collapsed or are just looking for temporary employment.
Recent estimates of the total number of speakers of Russian:
| Source | Native speakers | Native Rank | Total speakers | Total rank |
|---|
G. Weber, "Top Languages",
Language Monthly,
3: 12–18, 1997, ISSN 1369-9733 | 160,000,000 | 8 | 285,000,000 | 5 | | World Almanac (1999) | 145,000,000 | 8 (2005) | 275,000,000 | 5 | | SIL (2000 WCD) | 145,000,000 | 8 | 255,000,000 | 5–6 (tied with Arabic) | | CIA World Factbook (2005) | 160,000,000 | 8 | |
Official statusRussian is the official language of Russia. It is also an official language of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine and the de facto official language of the unrecognized of Transnistria, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Education in Russian is still a popular choice for both Russian as a second language (RSL) and native speakers in Russia as well as many of the former Soviet republics.
97% of the public school students of Russia, 75% in Belarus, 41% in Kazakhstan, 25% in Ukraine, 23% in Kyrgyzstan, 21% in Moldova, 7% in Azerbaijan, 5% in Georgia and 2% in Armenia and Tajikistan receive their education only or mostly in Russian. Although the corresponding percentage of ethnic Russians is 78% in Russia, 10% in Belarus, 26% in Kazakhstan, 17% in Ukraine, 9% in Kyrgyzstan, 6% in Moldova, 2% in Azerbaijan, 1.5% in Georgia and less than 1% in both Armenia and Tajikistan.
Russian-language schooling is also available in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, but due to education reforms, a number of subjects taught in Russian are reduced at the high school level. The language has a co-official status alongside Moldovan in the autonomies of Gagauzia and Transnistria in Moldova, and in seven Romanian communes in Tulcea and Constanta counties. In these localities, Russian-speaking Lipovans, who are a recognized ethnic minority, make up more than 20% of the population. Thus, according to Romania's minority rights law, education, signage, and access to public administration and the justice system are provided in Russian alongside Romanian. In the Autonomous Republic of Crimea in Ukraine, Russian is an officially recognized language alongside with Crimean Tatar, but in reality, is the only language used by the government, thus being a de facto official language.
DialectsDespite leveling after 1900, especially in matters of vocabulary, a number of dialects exist in Russia. Some linguists divide the dialects of the Russian language into two primary regional groupings, "Northern" and "Southern", with Moscow lying on the zone of transition between the two. Others divide the language into three groupings, Northern, Central and Southern, with Moscow lying in the Central region. Dialectology within Russia recognizes dozens of smaller-scale variants.
The dialects often show distinct and non-standard features of pronunciation and intonation, vocabulary, and grammar. Some of these are relics of ancient usage now completely discarded by the standard language.
The northern Russian dialects and those spoken along the Volga River typically pronounce unstressed clearly (the phenomenon called okanye/??????). East of Moscow, particularly in Ryazan Region, unstressed and following palatalized consonants and preceding a stressed syllable are not reduced to (like in the Moscow dialect), being instead pronounced as in such positions (e.g. ????? is pronounced as , not as ) - this is called yakanye/ ??????; many southern dialects have a palatalized final in 3rd person forms of verbs (this is unpalatalized in the standard dialect) and a fricative where the standard dialect has . However, in certain areas south of Moscow, e.g. in and around Tula, is pronounced as in the Moscow and northern dialects unless it precedes a voiceless plosive or a pause. In this position is lenited and devoiced to the fricative , e.g. ???? (in Moscow's dialect, only ??? , ?????? , ?????? and some derivatives follow this rule). Some of these features (e.g. a debuccalized or lenited and palatalized final in 3rd person forms of verbs) are also present in modern Ukrainian, indicating either a linguistic continuum or strong influence one way or the other.
The city of Veliky Novgorod has historically displayed a feature called chokanye/tsokanye (???????/???????), where and were confused (this is thought to be due to influence from Finnish, which doesn't distinguish these sounds). So, ????? ("heron") has been recorded as '?????'. Also, the second palatalization of velars did not occur there, so the so-called e² (from the Proto-Slavonic diphthong *ai) did not cause to shift to ; therefore where Standard Russian has ???? ("chain"), the form ???? is attested in earlier texts.
Among the first to study Russian dialects was Lomonosov in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth, Vladimir Dal compiled the first dictionary that included dialectal vocabulary. Detailed mapping of Russian dialects began at the turn of the twentieth century. In modern times, the monumental Dialectological Atlas of the Russian Language (?????????????????? ????? ???????? ????? ), was published in 3 folio volumes 1986–1989, after four decades of preparatory work.
The standard language is based on (but not identical to) the Moscow dialect.
Derived languages- Balachka a dialect, spoken primarily by Cossacks, in the regions of Don, Kuban and Terek.
- Fenya, a criminal argot of ancient origin, with Russian grammar, but with distinct vocabulary.
- Nadsat, the fictional language spoken in 'A Clockwork Orange' uses a lot of Russian words and Russian slang.
- Surzhyk is a language with Russian and Ukrainian features, spoken in some areas of Ukraine
- Trasianka is a language with Russian and Belarusian features used by a large portion of the rural population in Belarus.
- Quelia, a pseudo pidgin of German and Russian.
- Runglish, Russian-English pidgin. This word is also used by English speakers to describe the way in which Russians attempt to speak English using Russian morphology and/or syntax.
- Russenorsk is an extinct pidgin language with mostly Russian vocabulary and mostly Norwegian grammar, used for communication between Russians and Norwegian traders in the Pomor trade in Finnmark and the Kola Peninsula.
Writing system
Alphabet
Russian is written using a modified version of the Cyrillic (?????????) alphabet. The Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters. The following table gives their upper case forms, along with values for each letter's typical sound:
Older letters of the Russian alphabet include <>, which merged to (); and <>, which both merged to (); <>, which merged to (); and <>, which merged to ( or ). While these older letters have been abandoned at one time or another, they may be used in this and related articles. The yers and originally indicated the pronunciation of ultra-short or reduced , .
The Russian alphabet has many systems of character encoding. KOI8-R was designed by the government and was intended to serve as the standard encoding. This encoding is still used in UNIX-like operating systems. Nevertheless, the spread of MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows created chaos and ended by establishing different encodings as de-facto standards. For communication purposes, a number of conversion applications were developed. \ "iconv" is an example that is supported by most versions of Linux, Macintosh and some other operating systems.
Most implementations (especially old ones) of the character encoding for the Russian language are aimed at simultaneous use of English and Russian characters only and do not include support for any other language. Certain hopes for a unification
of the character encoding for the Russian alphabet are related to the Unicode standard, specifically designed for peaceful coexistence
of various languages, including even dead languages. Unicode also supports the letters of the
Early Cyrillic alphabet, which have many similarities with the Greek alphabet.
Orthography
Russian spelling is reasonably phonemic in practice. It is in fact a balance among phonemics, morphology, etymology, and grammar; and, like that of most living languages, has its share of inconsistencies and controversial points. A number of rigid spelling rules introduced between the 1880s and 1910s have been responsible for the latter whilst trying to eliminate the former.
The current spelling follows the major reform of 1918, and the final codification of 1956. An update proposed in the late 1990s has met a hostile reception, and has not been formally adopted.
The punctuation, originally based on Byzantine Greek, was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reformulated on the French and German models.
Sounds
The phonological system of Russian is inherited from Common Slavonic, but underwent considerable modification in the early historical period, before being largely settled by about 1400.
The language possesses five vowels, which are written with different letters depending on whether or not the preceding consonant is palatalized. The consonants typically come in plain vs. palatalized pairs, which are traditionally called hard and soft. (The hard consonants are often velarized, especially before back vowels, although in some dialects the velarization is limited to hard ). The standard language, based on the Moscow dialect, possesses heavy stress and moderate variation in pitch. Stressed vowels are somewhat lengthened, while unstressed vowels tend to be reduced to near-close vowels or an unclear schwa. (See also: vowel reduction in Russian.)
The Russian syllable structure can be quite complex with both initial and final consonant clusters of up to 4 consecutive sounds. Using a formula with V standing for the nucleus (vowel) and C for each consonant the structure can be described as follows:
(C)(C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C)
Clusters of four consonants are not very common, however, especially within a morpheme.
Consonants
Russian is notable for its distinction based on palatalization of most of the consonants. While do have palatalized allophones , only might be considered a phoneme, though it is marginal and generally not considered distinctive (the only native minimal pair which argues for to be a separate phoneme is "??? ????"/"???? ???"). Palatalization means that the center of the tongue is raised during and after the articulation of the consonant. In the case of , the tongue is raised enough to produce slight frication (affricate sounds). These sounds: are dental, that is pronounced with the tip of the tongue against the teeth rather than against the alveolar ridge.
Grammar
Russian has preserved an Indo-European synthetic-inflectional structure, although considerable leveling has taken place.
Russian grammar encompasses
- a highly synthetic morphology
- a syntax that, for the literary language, is the conscious fusion of three elements:
The spoken language has been influenced by the literary one, but continues to preserve characteristic forms. The dialects show various non-standard grammatical features, some of which are archaisms or descendants of old forms since discarded by the literary language.
Proverbs and sayings The Russian language is replete with many hundreds of proverbs (????????? ) and sayings (????????a ). These were already tabulated by the seventeenth century, and collected and studied in the nineteenth and twentieth, with the folk-tales being an especially fertile source.
History and examples
The history of Russian language may be divided into the following periods.
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