Russian Language - An Overview From a Translation Agency

Russian belongs to the East Slavic group of languages, a subdivision of the Indo-European language family, and is one of the three surviving languages of this group together with Belarusian and Ukrainian.

Russian is the most geographically spread language in both Europe and Asia and it is used by approximately 170 million native speakers living in Russia, Belarus, Moldavia and in the former Asian confederate states Kazakhstan, Kirgizstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan.

From a historical point of view, Russian language can be divided into five periods: Kievan period, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania period, the Moscovite period, the Empire and the Soviet period.
The earliest discovered documents written in Russian were found at Novgorod and they date from the 11th century.

It was only during the reign of Peter the Great (end of 17th century) that written Russian began to be used more often. He also conducted a reform of Old Russian and Old Church Slavonic and encouraged writers to use a literary style closer to the spoken language.

During the reign of Peter the Great a new, revised alphabet was introduced and a new language (based on the Moscow dialect) began to take shape.

The 19th century writer Aleksandr Puskin was the one who chiseled this language, a language almost identical with the Russian spoken nowadays. This was the century when Russian literature flourished and writers like Dostoyevskii, Tolstoi and Gogol published some of the classic Russian masterpieces, contributing through them to the development of the new language.

Russian was the only official language of both the Russian Empire and the USSR. After the USSR break-up in 1991, many of the former soviet states encouraged their people to speak their native languages and thus reinforce their newly gained freedom.

However, Russian is still a very powerful and widely spread language. Russian is a must for people working in air and space communications and it comes in very handy for scientists considering that almost 25% of the world's scientific literature is published in Russian.

The power the former URSS used to have (over the Eastern European countries in particular) is proven by the almost 60 million people who speak Russian as a second language.

Russian is a difficult language to learn. It uses the Cyrillic alphabet, which is a challenge in itself, and it has a very large and coulourful vocabulary that consists of over 750,000 words.

Ioana Mihailas is a linguist for Lingo24 document translation service in London, a leading UK provider of legal translation services.

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