Russian Language

I  INTRODUCTION 

Russian Language, official language of Russia. Russian was the lingua franca of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union; it is still used as a second language in the other former Soviet republics. It is also known as Great Russian and forms, with Belarusian and Ukrainian, the eastern branch of the Slavic languages. Russian is spoken by about 170 million people in Russia, some former Soviet republics, Israel, the United States, China, and Mongolia. Russian includes three groups of dialects: northern, southern, and central, the last named a transitional group combining northern and southern features. The southern and central dialects are distinguished by the so-called akan’je, coalescence of certain vowels outside of stress. The standard Russian is based on a central dialect of Moscow. It is one of the five official languages of the United Nations.


II  CHARACTER

The Russian language uses the Cyrillic alphabet; it has 33 letters. Spelling is basically, though not completely, phonetic, and the rules of pronunciation are few and simple. Russian has no article, either definite or indefinite. The three grammatical genders into which all Russian nouns fall are the masculine, the feminine, and the neuter. The nouns are declined according to case and number. The six cases are the nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental, and prepositional, and the two numbers are the singular and the plural. Adjectives agree with nouns in gender, case, and number. The verb has three tenses, present, past, and future; in addition it has the category of aspect. The two aspects are the imperfective, presenting the action as a process of repetition, and the perfective, presenting the action as a unified whole, usually from the point of view of its completion. The distinction in aspect is preserved in all three moods, indicative, subjunctive-conditional, and imperative, and in participles, both adverbial and adjectival, the latter being either passive or active. Due to declension and conjugation, the word order in Russian is not as strict as in English. A typical feature of Russian vocabulary is large families of words derived from the same root by means of various prefixes and suffixes.

III  HISTORY 

Writing began at the end of the 10th century after the conversion of the Slavic peoples in the area to Christianity. The written language introduced by the missionaries was Old Church Slavonic, also called Old Bulgarian or Old Slavonic. At the time of its introduction, Old Church Slavonic was readily understood by Eastern Slavs. Gradually, however, the difference between the written and the spoken language increased, the spoken language undergoing a number of simplifications in both its phonemic (sound) and morphological (word-forming) structure.

Old Church Slavonic continued to be used as the literary language until the end of the 17th century, and only in administrative and legal matters was writing completely free from Old Church Slavonic influences.

In the 18th century the secularization of culture that occurred during the reign of the Russian emperor Peter the Great caused a great upheaval in language. The old written language, whether the essentially ecclesiastical Old Church Slavonic or the administrative language, was unable to encompass the many scientific, technological, cultural, and political concepts that Peter introduced, and a written language developed that was actually a mixture of styles, including the archaic Old Church Slavonic, the vernacular, and the recently borrowed Western elements. A new norm developed that reached its present state in the first half of the 19th century.


Contributed By:
Nicholas Ozerov
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