Russian Dialects
Russian language belongs to Indo-European family, Slavic group, East Slavic branch. It derived from Old Russian language in 14th-15th centuries from which also Ukrainian and Byelorussian derived. Its closest relatives are the remaining two East Slavic languages: Ukrainian and Byelorussian, Byelorussian being the closest. Other relatives include Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Slovene from South Slavic branch and Polish, Czech, Slovak, Upper Sorbian, Lower Sorbian, Polabian (extinct) from West Slavic branch.On the vast territory of Russia you will see almost no dialectal divisions, almost all people speak common literary language, only old people might still use local dialects which vary little from place to place.
Russian is rather synthetic than analytic language and being a synthetic language it is flective, not agglutinative, that is it uses a lot of prefixes, suffixes and flections and it can express in one word what analytic language like English has to use three words for; but unlike agglutinative languages, like Finno-Ugrian and Turkish ones, the same flection might express a lot of different grammatical categories and different flections might express the same grammatical category.
Despite levelling after 1900, especially in matters of vocabulary, a large number of dialects exists in Russia. Some linguists divide the dialects of the Russian language into two primary regional groupings, "Northern" and "Southern," with Moscow lying on the zone of transition between the two. Others divide the language into three groupings, Northern, Central and Southern, with Moscow lying in the Central region. Dialectology within Russia recognizes dozens of smaller-scale variants.
The dialects often show distinct and non-standard features of pronunciation and intonation, vocabulary, and grammar. Some of these are relics of ancient usage now completely discarded by the standard language.
The northern dialects typically pronounce unstressed /o/ clearly (the phenomenon called okanye); the southern palatalize the final /t/ and aspirate the /g/ into /h/. It should be noted that some of these features are also present in modern Ukrainian, indicating a linguistic continuum or strong influence one way or the other.
Among the first to study Russian dialects was Lomonosov in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth, Vladimir Dal compiled the first dictionary that included dialectal vocabulary. Detailed mapping of Russian dialects began at the turn of the twentieth century. In modern times, the monumental Dialectological Atlas of the Russian Language was published in 3 folio volumes 1986-1989, after four decades of preparatory work.