The official language of Russia is Russian which also has the distinction of being one of only four surviving East Slavic languages still used today. Rooted in the Indo-European family of languages Russian uses a Cyrillic alphabet which contains 33 letters. The modern alphabet includes many older characters which have been merged together in order to form new letters. Within Russia, there are numerous local dialects including those of citizens living in the north, south, and central parts of the enormous country.

Russian is the native language of a large percentage of people living in Europe and is the official language not only of Russia but also the neighboring countries of Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Kyrgyzstan. In 2012 it was estimated that throughout the world approximately 260 million people speak Russian. Other languages spoken in the country include Chechen, Ukrainian, and Bashkir.

Although Russian can be a very complex language to learn, there are some simple phrases that one can use while traveling. "Dobraye ootro" meanings "good morning", while "Dobriy den" means "good afternoon". To say "hi", one can say "Preevyet".

Russia is the largest country on Earth and has an estimated population of approximately 143 million people. A major part of Russian society is the influential role played by its roughly one hundred ethnic groups, all of whom speak about a hundred different languages. In 2002 it was reported that besides Russian, 5.3 million inhabitants in the nation spoke Tatar, a language with linguistic roots in Turkey. Ukrainian also ranked highly in terms of its status as one of Russia’s minority languages with an estimated 1.8 million native speakers.

This page was last modified on May 1st, 2018

More on Graphicmaps