Russian Language Lessons - Learn Russian For Free. Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet and pronunciation. Russian is an Eastern Slavonic language closely related to Ukrainian and Belarusian with about 277 million speakers mainly in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus. It is also spoken in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Finland, Mongolia, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Israel, Afghanistan, the USA, Canada and a number of countries. The earliest known writing in Russia dates from the 10th 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 (a.k.a. Russian literature started to flower during the 19th century when Tolstoi, Dostoyevskii, Gogol and Pushkin were active. Russian alphabet (русский алфавит) 1708 version The letters in blue had fallen out of use by the 1800 century. 1918 version Cursive Russian alphabet Links.
Languages - A Guide to Russian - Facts, key phrases and the Russian alphabet. Learn Russian Language - Beginning to Advanced Russian. Russian language. Russian (ру́сский язы́к, russkij jazyk, pronounced [ˈruskʲɪj jɪˈzɨk]) is a Slavic language spoken primarily in the Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics of the Soviet Union and former participants of the Eastern Bloc.[22][23] Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of the three living members of the East Slavic languages.
Written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century onwards. It is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages. It is also the largest native language in Europe, with 144 million native speakers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Classification[edit] Russian is a Slavic language of the Indo-European family. It is a lineal descendant of the language used in Kievan Rus'.