Russian Language Facts
Russian is a Slavic language developed from migration of some Slavs eastward after 7th Century BC.It uses the Cyrillic alphabet, which is based on the Greek alphabet with some Hebrew letters to represent sounds alien to the Greek writing system.
Russian is mostly phonetic. Most complications arise from its complex stress system.
Stress is mobile and flexible and does not follow strict rules. The correct placement of stress is one of the major problems when learning Russian language.
About 250 million people around the world speak Russian, including 180 million people on the territory of the former URSS.
Spoken in: Russia and many other countries
Region: Eastern Europe and Asia
Total speakers: 285 million
was influenced by the Turkish languages in the 13-15th centuries and later by the European languages (English, French, German and Italian)
Statistics:
- Russia - 143,782,338
- Ukraine - 11,335,000
- Kazakhstan - 6,227,000
- Uzbekistan - 1,661,000
- Relarus - 1,134,000
- Kyrgyzstan - 1,408,800
- Latvia - 861,600
- Moldova - 562,000
- Israel - 750,000
- Azerbaijan - 475,000
- Estonia - 474,834
- Georgia - 372,000
- Germany - 360,000
- Turkmenistan - 349,000
- Lithuania - 344,000
- United States - 334,615
- Tajikistan - 237,000
- Armenia - 70,000
- Poland - 60,000
- Canada - 31,745
- Bulgaria - 18,000
- Uruguay - 14,000
- China - 13,504
- Mongolia - 4,000
- Norway - 3,000
- Czech Republic (?)
- India (?)
Total - 170,882,436
Classification: Indo-European | Slavic