Languages
Native
Russian
98%
Secondary languages
English
11%
Language Samples
Привет, как дела?
Privet, kak dela?
Hello, how are you?
У меня всё хорошо, спасибо.
U menya vsyo khorosho, spasibo.
I am very well, thanks.
Один, два, три, четыре, пять, шесть, семь, восемь, девять, десять.
Odin, dva, tri, chetyre, pyat, shest, sem, vosem, devyat, desyat.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
Linguistic History
Russian is an East Slavic language that evolved from Old East Slavic, the common tongue of Kievan Rus'. After the Mongol invasion fragmented the Rus' principalities in the 13th century, distinct Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian languages gradually emerged. The language was heavily standardised during the 18th century under Peter the Great, who modernised the alphabet and introduced many Western European loanwords. The Cyrillic script used today was reformed in 1918. Russian became one of the six official languages of the United Nations in 1945 and remains the most widely spoken Slavic language in the world, with over 150 million native speakers.
Similar Languages
Ukrainian
86%
Belarusian
84%
Polish
74%
Slovak
70%
Media
Saint Basil's Cathedral on Red Square, Moscow — an iconic symbol of Russian culture and history.
Photo: Tsy1980 · CC BY-SA 4.0
Did You Know
01
Russian has three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and six grammatical cases, giving nouns up to 12 distinct forms.
02
The word 'sputnik' (спутник), meaning 'fellow traveller' or 'satellite', entered virtually every language on Earth after the 1957 Soviet launch.
03
Russian is the most geographically widespread language in Eurasia, stretching across 11 time zones from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok.