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Russian (русский язык /'ruski jɪ'zɨk/) is the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages.Russian belongs to the group of Indo-European languages, and is therefore related to Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, as well as the modern Germanic, Romance, and Celtic languages, including English, French, and Irish. Written examples are attested from the 10th century onwards.
While it preserves much of its ancient synthetic-inflexional structure and a Common Slavonic word base, modern Russian shares a large stock of the international vocabulary for politics, science, and technology. A language of political importance in the twentieth century, Russian is one of the official languages of the United Nations.
NOTE. Russian is written in a non-Latin script. All examples below are in the Cyrillic alphabet, with transcriptions in SAMPA (without regard to the reduction of unstressed vowels).
| Russian (русский язык)
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| Spoken in:
| RussiaThe Russian Federation ( Russian: , transliteration: Rossiyskaya Federatsiya or Rossijskaja Federacija , or Russia (Russian: , transliteration: Rossiya or Rossija , is a country that stretches over a vast expanse of eastern Europe and northern Asia. With and many other countries
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| Region:
| Eastern EuropeEastern Europe is, by convention, a region defined geographically as that part of Europe covering the eastern part of the continent. Generally this means that it lies between the Ural and Caucasus mountains and the western border of Russia, or alternative and AsiaThe continent of Asia is defined by subtracting Europe and Africa from the great land mass of Africa-Eurasia. The boundaries are vague, especially between Asia and Europe: Asia and Africa meet somewhere near the Suez Canal. The boundary between Asia and E
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| Total speakers:
| 280 million
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| Ranking:
| 4-7
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| Genetic classification:
| Indo-European
Satem phylumThe Satem division of the Indo-European family includes the following branches: Indo-Iranian, Baltic and Slavic, Armenian, Albanian, plus a number of barely documented extinct languages, such as Thracian and Dacian (see: Indo-European languages). All thos
Slavic
East SlavicOne of three regional subgroups of Slavic languages, currently spoken in Eastern Europe; and the group with the largest numbers of speakers, far out-numbering the Western and Southern Slavic groups. Current East Slavic languages: Belarusian, Russian, Ukra
Russian
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| Official status
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| Official language of:
| RussiaThe Russian Federation ( Russian: , transliteration: Rossiyskaya Federatsiya or Rossijskaja Federacija , or Russia (Russian: , transliteration: Rossiya or Rossija , is a country that stretches over a vast expanse of eastern Europe and northern Asia. With, BelarusThe Republic of Belarus ( Belarusian: #x301 Russian: #x301 (former: #x301 ) is a landlocked nation of Eastern Europe with the capital Minsk. Name Main article: White Russia The spellings Belorussia and Byelorussia are transliterations of the name of the c, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, United Nations
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| Regulated by:
| -
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| Language codes
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| ISO 639-1 | ru
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| ISO 639-2 | rus
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| SIL | RUS
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