Introduction to Russian

THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE: OVERVIEW

Depending on your background, there might be lots of questions you are asking yourself about the Russian language. Is it hard to learn? Is it worth learning Russian at all? How does it compare to other languages? How is it spelt? Can I pronounce the sounds of Russian? And so on. Let us take a look at some of those questions in more detail.

Russian is spoken by about 260 million people worldwide (2020), primarily in the Russian Federation and some countries in Asia. However, if we look more closely, it turns out that there are many countries in the world where you can make yourself understood in this language. If you meet people who are from Georgia, Estonia, or Kazakhstan, for example, there is a good chance you can talk to them in Russian. Here is a non-exhaustive list of countries where Russian is understood in varying degrees:

COUNTRY                      APPROXIMATE NUMBER OF SPEAKERS

RUSSIA                                        118.5 MILLION
UKRAINE                                        14.2 MILLION
BELARUS                                         6.6 MILLION
KAZAKHSTAN                                      3.8 MILLION
AZERBAIJAN                                           120000
GEORGIA                                               46000
ARMENIA                                               23000
KYRGYZSTAN                                           482000
UZBEKISTAN                                           720000
TURKMENISTAN                                         305000
MOLDOVA                                              264000
ESTONIA                                              383000
LATVIA                                               700000
LITHUANIA                                            190000

SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA, 2024

It is worth emphasizing that these numbers are approximate. However, as a general rule of thumb, you will be able to communicate with people from the above countries using the Russian language, since the majority of the population understands it.

SIMILARITIES BETWEEN RUSSIAN AND OTHER LANGUAGES

Russian is an Indo-European language, which means it is related to English, French, Spanish, Persian, some languages spoken in India, and many more. When we say related, we mean that the vocabulary of most Indo-European languages is similar to Russian. In addition, sentence structure in Russian is more or less the same as in English, French, etc. Let us take a look at a randomly chosen word, and see how it compares to Russian in different languages:

NOTE: NON-LATIN CHARACTERS HAVE BEEN REPLACED BY THEIR TRANSCRIPTIONS.

Even if the reader is not familiar with the exact pronunciation of the above words, it is clearly seen that the word ‘bridge’ sounds the same (or very similar) in a number of languages, such as Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Polish, and more. The reason for this is the fact that Russian is closely related to a subgroup of Indo-European languages called Slavic Languages. Below are the Slavic languages which have at least one million speakers:

The similarity between these languages is striking: a significant part of the vocabulary is largely the same. At the same time, their grammatical structure shows a lot of common traits as well. Therefore, a person who knows one Slavic language can relatively easily understand the other Slavic languages, too.

HOW RUSSIAN IS WRITTEN

Russian is written using the Cyrillic script which was developed in the 9th century AD, and serves as the official script in various parts of Eurasia. Not all Slavic languages use the Cyrillic script, though: Slovakian, Czech, Croatian and some others are written with a modified version of the latin alphabet.

RUSSIAN SCRIPT VS. CYRILLIC SCRIPT

When we say Russian script, we are talking about the Russian alphabet. Note that this is not exactly the same as the concept of Cyrillic script. Cyrillic is a more general term referring to various alphabets like Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, etc. There are slight differences between the alphabets of these languages, however, all of them are called Cyrillic.

A FIRST LOOK AT RUSSIAN VOCABULARY

Here are a couple of words to give you an idea of the vocabulary of the Russian language. As you may notice, some of the words are spelt and pronounced almost like in English. You may click the speaker icon to hear how a native speaker pronounces the word in question.

* Audio samples are provided by The Shtooka Project.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CYRILLIC, LATIN AND GREEK SCRIPTS

A careful observer may notice that some of the Cyrillic letters are written the same way as their Latin counterparts, for example, the letters A, O, T. What’s more, some Cyrillic letters may also be found in the Greek alphabet. The reason for this is the fact that these three scripts are related to each other, namely, both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets were derived from Greek. Sometimes, Greek is referred to as the parent script, whereas Cyrillic and Latin are called the ‘children’. The following Venn diagram shows the exact relationship between these writing systems:

The Latin and the Cyrillic scripts were adapted to a multitude of languages, therefore, there exist a great number of extra letters which were not present in the original systems. In the case of Latin, various diacritical marks were generally added to individual characters, e.g. È (French), Ó (Hungarian). In the case of Cyrillic, completely new character shapes were usually included in the alphabet when the original letters were not sufficient, e.g. Џ (Macedonian), Њ (Serbian), Ө (Mongolian).