Concept

Russian language

Overview

Russian is an East Slavic language belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is one of the four extant East Slavic languages, and is the native language of the Russian people. Russian was the de facto (and de jure in its final years) official language of the former Soviet Union. It has remained an official language of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, and is still commonly used as a lingua franca in Ukraine, Moldova, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and to a lesser extent in the Baltic states and Israel.

Russian has over 210 million total speakers worldwide. It is the most spoken native language in Europe, the most spoken Slavic language, and the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia. It is the world's seventh-most spoken language by number of native speakers, and the world's eleventh-most spoken language by total number of speakers. Russian is one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station, one of the six official languages of the United Nations, as well as the seventh most widely used language on the Internet.

Russian is written using the Russian alphabet of the Cyrillic script; it distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called "soft" and "hard" sounds. Almost every consonant has hard–soft counterparts, and the distinction is a prominent feature of the language, which is usually shown in writing not by a change of the consonant but rather by changing the following vowel. Another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels. Stress, which is often unpredictable, is not normally indicated orthographically, though an optional acute accent may be used to mark stress, such as to distinguish between homographic words (e.g. замо́к [zamók, 'lock'] and за́мок [zámok, 'castle']), or to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words or proper nouns.

Russian is a typical fusional language, where a single inflectional morpheme at the end of a word is used to denote multiple grammatical features. In addition to inflection for morphology Russian also actively uses prefixes and suffixes for word formation, more so than most other Slavic languages. Also, Russian uses word compounding (including open compounding) more than most other Slavic languages. For example, 'railroad' in Russian is two words (железная дорога, zheleznaya doroga), whereas in Czech it is one word (železnice).

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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In the physics of Aristotle, it is by the concepts "high" and "low," spontaneous displacement and forced displacement, own place and strange place, that the movement of a body shot into space or falling freely is defined. But Galileo thought there was no essential moment, no privileged instant. To study the falling body is to consider it at it matters not what moment in its course. The true science of gravity is…
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
States what Russian language is; the author is tied to Russian language in the knowledge graph.
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This process of composition is sometimes found in its incipient stage—a stage in which the component words are temporarily united to signify some unnamed object, and do not (from lack of frequent use) permanently cohere. But in the majority of inferior languages, the process of “agglutination,” as it is called, has gone far enough to produce considerable stability in the compound words: there is a manifest…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
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Nurses can teach us this language; they understand all their nurslings say to them, they answer them, and keep up long conversations with them; and though they use words, these words are quite useless. It is not the hearing of the word, but its accompanying intonation that is understood. To the language of intonation is added the no less forcible language of gesture. The child uses, not its weak hands, but its face…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile
States what Russian language is.
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Russian language

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