# Russian Language

By [Untitled](https://paragraph.com/@0x39bbe25590af1d43357ff8fda59858eec219198d) · 2024-03-07

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Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages. 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).

Written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century onwards, and while Russian preserves much of East Slavonic grammar and a Common Slavonic word base, modern Russian exhibits a large stock of borrowed international vocabulary for politics, science, and technology. Due to the status of the Soviet Union as a superpower, Russian had great political importance in the 20th century, and is still one of the official languages of the United Nations.

Russian has palatal secondary articulation of consonants, the so-called soft and hard sounds. This distinction is found in almost all consonant phonemes and is one of the most distinguishing features of the language. Another important aspect is the reduction, or drawling, of unstressed vowels, not entirely unlike a similar process present in most forms of English. Stress in Russian is generally quite unpredictable and can be placed on almost any syllable, one of the most difficult aspects for foreign language learners.

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. Some academics also consider Rusyn an East Slavic language; others consider Rusyn just a dialect of Ukrainian.

The basic vocabulary, 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. Upon annexion of the Novgorod by Muscovy in 1478, Old-Novgorod dialect although vanished during 15–16 century, played a significant role in formation of the modern Russian language. The literary Russian has also a noticeable similarity with the modern Bulgarian language sharing about 60% vocabulary in fiction literature and up to 80% of the words used in journalistic genre while having notable differences in grammar.

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*Originally published on [Untitled](https://paragraph.com/@0x39bbe25590af1d43357ff8fda59858eec219198d/russian-language)*