The Russian Language

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Russian 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, the Ukraine and Belarus. Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers and the seventh by total number of speakers. The language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

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Competence of Russian in the countries of the former USSR, 2004

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Chinese entrepreneurs learn the Russian language.

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Classification Russian is a Slavic language of the Indo-European family. It is a lineal descendant of the language used in Kievan Rus'. From the point of view of the spoken language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian and Belarusian. In the 19th century, the language was often called "Great Russian" to distinguish it from Belarusian, then called "White Russian" and Ukrainian, then called "Little Russian". 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.

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Over the course of centuries, the vocabulary and literary style of Russian have also been influenced by Western and Central European languages such as Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian and English.

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Borrowing On the vocabulary of the modern Russian language had considerable influence in the languages with which Russian for a long time in contact with. The oldest layer of borrowing - the East German origin (these are the words, like буква, князь, крест, стекло, хлеб etc..), As well as words borrowed from ancient Iranian languages - for example рай, собака, топор, бог . The next layer up words Greek ( ад, грамота, икона, корабль, кровать, кукла etc..) And Turkic origin ( алмаз, изюм, кабан, казна, капкан etc.).

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In XVI century the main source of borrowing - Poland, through which Russian penetrates as a large number of Latin, Romance and Germanic words ( абстракция, алгебра, музыка, юбка, ярмарка etc..) In the new period (XVIII c.) Borrowings come primarily from the Netherlands ( абрикос, дрейф, зонтик, матрос, парик, яхта ), German ( абзац, айсберг, бинт, биржа, галстук and many others) And French ( абажур, авангард, аванс, альбом, актёр etc..).

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At the moment the most powerful source of borrowing is English, borrowing some of which date back as early as XIX - first half of the XX century ( аврал, тренд, уик-энд, файл, холдинг etc..) From other European languages borrowing was significantly less, but in some areas of vocabulary, their role is also quite important. For example, a number of military terms borrowed from Hungarian ( солдат, гусар, сабля ), a large amount of music, as well as a number of financial, culinary, etc.. Terms - from the Italian: ария, виолончель, казино, пианино, сольфеджио, соната, сопрано and others.

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A number of Russian words became internationalisms borrowed from Russian into many languages of the world ( мамонт, матрёшка, перестройка, самовар, спутник ). It should be born in mind that the vast majority of Russian names is also borrowed from the Greek (such as Alexander, Basil, George, Helen, Xenia, Tatiana, etc..)

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Cyril and Methodius - the founders of the Church Slavonic language. Кирилл и Мефодий — основоположники церковнославянского языка.

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Standard Russian The standard well-known form of Russian is generally called the modern Russian literary language ( современный русский литературный язык ). It arose in the beginning of the 18th century with the modernization reforms of the Russian state under the rule of Peter the Great, and developed from the Moscow dialect substratum under the influence of some of the previous century's Russian chancellery language.

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The portrait of Alexander Pushkin ,the greatest Russian poet and the founder of the Russian literary language. Engraving,Basil Mate, 1899.

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A page from Azbuka (Alphabet book), the first Russian printed textbook. Printed by Ivan Fyodorov in 1574. This page features the Cyrillic script.

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Mikhail Lomonosov first compiled a normalizing grammar book in 1755 and in 1783 the Russian Academy's first explanatory Russian dictionary appeared. During the end of the 18th and 19th centuries, during a period known as the "Golden Age", the grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation of the Russian language was stabilized and standardized, and it became the nationwide literary language; meanwhile, Russia's world-famous literature flourished.

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Until the 20th century, the language's spoken form was the language of only the upper noble classes and urban population, as Russian peasants from the countryside continued to speak in their own dialects. By the mid-20th century, such dialects were finally forced out with the introduction of the compulsory education system that was established by the Soviet government, as well as the influence of the mass media (radio and television). However, despite the formalization of Standard Russian, some dialectal features are still observed in colloquial speech.

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Other dialects are 12. Northern Russian dialect with Belarusian influence 13. Sloboda dialects of Ukrainian 14. Steppe dialect of Ukrainian with Russian influence 1. Arkhangelsk dialect 2. Olonets dialect 3. Novgorod dialect 4. Viatka dialect 5. Vladimir dialect 6. Moscow dialect 7. Tver dialect 8. Orel (Don) dialect 9. Ryazan dialect 10. Tula dialect 11. Smolensk dialect

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Alphabet Russian is written using a Cyrillic alphabet. The Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters. The following table gives their upper case forms, along with IPA values for each letter's typical sound:

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This page from an ABC book printed in Moscow in 1694 shows the letter П.

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Transliteration Because of many technical restrictions in computing and also because of the unavailability of Cyrillic keyboards abroad, Russian is often transliterated using the Latin alphabet. For example, мороз ("frost") is transliterated moroz, and мышь ("mouse"), mysh . Once commonly used by the majority of those living outside Russia, transliteration is being used less frequently by Russian-speaking typists in favor of the extension of Unicode character encoding, which fully incorporates the Russian alphabet.

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Thank you for your attention ;)