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Русский ┃ Russian ▢𓏺｜Definition｜1st｜20260117143445-00-◊

Russian language - Wikipedia

Russian language

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Russian1 is an East Slavic language belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is one of the four extant East Slavic languages,2 and is the native language of the Russian people. Russian was the de facto (and de jure in its final years3) official language of the former Soviet Union.4 It has remained an official language of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, and is still commonly used as a lingua franca in Ukraine, Moldova, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and to a lesser extent in the Baltic states and Israel.5678

Russian has over 210 million total speakers worldwide.[^2] It is the most spoken native language in Europe,9 the most spoken Slavic language,10 and the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia.10 It is the world’s seventh-most spoken language by number of native speakers, and the world’s eleventh-most spoken language by total number of speakers.11 Russian is one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station,12 one of the six official languages of the United Nations,13 as well as the seventh most widely used language on the Internet.14

Russian is written using the Russian alphabet of the Cyrillic script; it distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called “soft” and “hard” sounds. Almost every consonant has hard–soft counterparts, and the distinction is a prominent feature of the language, which is usually shown in writing not by a change of the consonant but rather by changing the following vowel. Another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels. Stress, which is often unpredictable, is not normally indicated orthographically,15 though an optional acute accent may be used to mark stress, such as to distinguish between homographic words (e.g. замо́к [zamók, ‘lock’] and за́мок [zámok, ‘castle’]), or to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words or proper nouns.

Russian is a typical fusional language, where a single inflectional morpheme at the end of a word is used to denote multiple grammatical features.16 In addition to inflection for morphology Russian also actively uses prefixes and suffixes for word formation, more so than most other Slavic languages.17 Also, Russian uses word compounding (including open compounding) more than most other Slavic languages. For example, ‘railroad’ in Russian is two words (железная дорога, zheleznaya doroga), whereas in Czech it is one word (železnice).18

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. Русский язык, Russkiy yazyk, pronounced [ˈruskʲɪj jɪˈzɨk] ↩

  2. Including Rusyn, which is sometimes classified as a dialect of Ukrainian in Ukraine. ↩

  3. From 1990. ↩

  4. Constitution and Fundamental Law of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1977: Section II, Chapter 6, Article 36 ↩

  5. “Russian Language Enjoying a Boost in Post-Soviet States”. Gallup. 1 August 2008. Archived from the original on 18 May 2010. Retrieved 16 May 2010. ↩

  6. Арефьев, Александр (2006). Падение статуса русского языка на постсоветском пространстве [The decline of the status of the Russian language in the post-Soviet space]. Демоскоп Weekly (in Russian) (251). Archived from the original on 8 March 2013. ↩

  7. Spolsky & Shohamy 1999, p. 236. ↩

  8. Isurin 2011, p. 13. ↩

  9. “The 10 Most Spoken Languages in Europe”. Tandem. 12 September 2019. Archived from the original on 2 June 2021. Retrieved 31 May 2021. ↩

  10. “Russian”. University of Toronto. Archived from the original on 28 June 2019. Retrieved 9 July 2021. Russian is the most widespread of the Slavic languages and the largest native language in Europe. Of great political importance, it is one of the official languages of the United Nations – making it a natural area of study for those interested in geopolitics. ↩ ↩2

  11. “The World’s Most Widely Spoken Languages”. Saint Ignatius High School. Cleveland, Ohio. Archived from the original on 27 September 2011. Retrieved 17 February 2012. ↩

  12. Wakata, Koichi. “My Long Mission in Space”. JAXA. Archived from the original on 26 April 2014. Retrieved 18 July 2021. The official languages on the ISS are English and Russian, and when I was speaking with the Flight Control Room at JAXA’s Tsukuba Space Center during ISS systems and payload operations, I was required to speak in either English or Russian. ↩

  13. “Official Languages”. United Nations. Archived from the original on 13 July 2021. Retrieved 16 July 2021. There are six official languages of the UN. These are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. The correct interpretation and translation of these six languages, in both spoken and written form, is very important to the work of the Organization, because this enables clear and concise communication on issues of global importance. ↩

  14. “Most used languages online by share of websites 2024”. Statista.com. Archived from the original on 27 April 2024. Retrieved 12 April 2024. ↩

  15. Timberlake 2004, p. 17. ↩

  16. Comrie, Bernard (2018). “Russian”. The World’s Major Languages. pp. 282–297. doi:10.4324/9781315644936-16. ISBN 978-1-315-64493-6. ↩

  17. “Focusing on prefixes and suffixes in Russian for more effective vocabulary learning | Sophia University”. 15 February 2024. Retrieved 29 November 2025. ↩

  18. “Slavic languages - Grammar, Morphology, Syntax | Britannica”. Encyclopedia Britannica. Archived from the original on 19 August 2025. Retrieved 29 November 2025. ↩

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