Russian (Русский язык)

Russian is an Eastern Slavonic language closely related to Ukrainian and Belarusian with about 277 million speakers in Russia and 30 other countries including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Greece, India, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania and Moldova.

The earliest known writing in Russia dates from the 11th century and was found at Novgorod. The main languages written on them in an early version of the Cyrillic alphabet were Old Russian and Old Church Slavonic. There are also some texts in Finnish, Latin and Greek.

Russian started appearing in writing regularly during the reign of Peter the Great (1672-1725) who introduced a revised alphabet and encouraged authors to use a literary style closer to their spoken language. The dialect of Moscow was used as the basis for written Russian.

Russian literature started to flower during the 19th century when Tolstoi, Dostoyevskii, Gogol and Pushkin were active. During the Soviet era knowledge of the Russian language was wide spread though the subjects authors could write about were restricted.

Russian alphabet (русский алфавит) and pronunciation

Russian alphabet and pronunciation

There are a number of transliteration schemes for Russian, details of which can be found at: http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/ntr/russisch/umschrifttabelle.html

Notes of the pronunciation of Russian

Cursive Russian alphabet

This is a version of the cursive handwritten Russian alphabet. A number of letters have quite different shapes when written in this way.

Cursive Russian alphabet

Sample text in Russian

Все люди рождаются свободными и равными в своем достоинстве и правах. Они наделены разумом и совестью и должны поступать в отношении друг друга в духе братства.

Cursive version

Cursive version of the Russian sample text

Transliteration

Vse ljudi roždajutsya svobodnymi i ravnymi v svoem dostoinstve i pravakh. Oni nadeleny razumom i sovest'ju i dolžny postupat' v otnošenii drug druga v dukhe bratstva.

Translation

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
(Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Longer sample text (Tower of Babel)

Useful phrases in Russian

Russian language learning materials