Russian

Russian is the 8th most spoken language in the world, and the 7th most spoken native language. It has 260 million speakers globally, including 150 native speakers and 110 second language speakers. This means that 2% of the worldwide population speaks Russian as their native languages. 

Russian is an East Slavic language and part of the Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. Russian is native to Eastern Europe and widely spoken across the Caucasus, the Baltic states, and Central Asia.

The East Slavic languages had evolved by the eleventh century and by the thirteenth century, the different dialects had diverged into distinct languages including medieval Russian.

Until the seventeenth century Russian was influenced by Church Slavonic, a literary language and the official language of Moscow. This was reformed in the eighteenth century and influences from Western European languages entered Standard Russian. The language then underwent a period of becoming standardised after. However, dialect differences continued across class and region, until the twentieth century when compulsory education became established, teaching a Standard form of Russian.

Russian is closely related to Belarusian, Ukrainian and Rusyn, as well has having notable similarities with Bulgarian. As the Russian language has evolved it has been influenced by the European languages of Greek, Latin, Dutch, Polish, French, German, Italian and English. Russian has also been influenced by the Asian languages of Uralic, Turkic, Persian, Arabic and Hebrew.

Russian is the official language of Russia, Belarus, and Tajikistan, it is also the co-official language of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Additionally, Russian has degrees of official recognition, in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Moldova, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and the Ukraine.

Russian is spoken by 260 million people worldwide across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, giving it the seventh largest number of speakers worldwide. The Russian language is incredibly useful for communicating with people all over the world, it is widely used in international trade and business and Russian is the second most common language on the Internet.