Russian language: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

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 extant 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).

Classification

Russian is a Slavic language, in the Indo-European family.

From the point of view of the spoken language, its closest relatives are Belarusian and Ukrainian, the other two national languages in the East Slavic group.

The basic vocabulary, principles of word-formation, and, to some extent, inflexions and literary style of Russian have been influenced by Church Slavonic, a developed and partly adopted form of the South Slavic Old Church Slavonic language used by the Russian Orthodox Church. Many words in modern literary Russian are closer in form to the modern Bulgarian language than the Ukrainian or Belarusian. However, the East Slavic forms have tended to remain in the various dialects. In some cases, both the East Slavic and the Church Slavonic forms are in use, with slightly different meanings. For details, see Historical Sound Changes and History.

It has been argued that the entire literary language is fundamentally based on Church Slavonic. Others have taken this argument a step further to suggest (controversially) that the closest relative of Russian should therefore be considered Bulgarian. Whatever the merits of the latter position, the nature of the relationship between Russian and Church Slavonic has been a main point of scientific debate in Russian philology, which in the twentieth century (since before the Soviet period) tended to draw a sharp distinction between the two.

Without a doubt, all three languages in the East Slavic group have influenced one another as well. Evaluations of this influence have changed in tune with political developments, and the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian commentators have tended to stress their own point of view.

Outside the Slavic languages, the vocabulary and literary style of Russian have been greatly influenced by Greek, Latin, French, German, and English.

Russian is primarily spoken in Russia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics of the USSR. Until 1917, it was the sole official language of the Russian Empire. During the Soviet period, the policy toward the languages of the various other ethnic groups fluctuated in practice. Though each of the constituent republics had its own official language, the unifying role, and superior status was reserved for Russian. Following the breakup of 1991, several of the newly independent states have encouraged their native languages, which has partly reversed the privileged status of Russian. Though its role as the language of post-Soviet national intercourse throughout the region has continued, this status may decline in the future.

In the twentieth century, it was widely taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact, and in other countries influenced by the USSR.

Russian is also spoken in Israel by 750,000 ethnic Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union (1999 census). The Israeli press and websites regularly publish material in Russian.

Sizable Russian-speaking communities (totalling in the hundreds of thousands) also exist in North America, and, to a lesser extent, in Western Europe. These have been fed by several waves of emigrants since the beginning of the twentieth century, each with its own flavour of language. The descendants of the Russian emigrés, however, have tended to lose the tongue of their ancestors by the third generation.

Recent estimates of the total number of speakers of Russian:

Official status

Russian is the official language of Russia, and an official language of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

Dialects

Despite levelling after 1900, especially in matters of vocabulary, a large number of dialects exists in Russia. Some linguists divide the dialects of the Russian language into two primary regional groupings, "Northern" and "Southern," with Moscow lying on the zone of transition between the two. Others divide the language into three groupings, Northern, Central and Southern, with Moscow lying in the Central region. Dialectology within Russia recognizes dozens of smaller-scale variants.

The dialects often show distinct and non-standard features of pronunciation and intonation, vocabulary, and grammar. Some of these are relics of ancient usage now completely discarded by the standard language.

The northern dialects typically pronounce unstressed /o/ clearly (the phenomenon called okanye оканье); the southern palatalize the final /t/ and aspirate the /g/ into /h/. It should be noted that these features are also present in modern Ukrainian, indicating a linguistic continuum or strong influence one way or the other.

Among the first to study Russian dialects was Lomonosov in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth, Vladimir Dahl compiled the first dictionary that included dialectal vocabulary. Detailed mapping of Russian dialects began at the turn of the twentieth century. In modern times, the monumental Dialectological Atlas of the Russian Language (Диалектологический атлас русского языка /dial'ektolog'itSesk'ij atlas russkovo jaz1ka/), was published in 3 folio volumes 1986-1989, after four decades of preparatory work.

The standard language is based on the Moscow dialect.

Derived languages

• Russenorsk is a pidgin language combining Russian and Norwegian.
• Russian sign language allows deaf people to communicate.
• Fenya or Fenka, a criminal lingo of ancient origin, with Russian grammar, but with distinct vocabulary.

Alphabet

Main article: Russian alphabet

Russian is written using a modern version of the Cyrillic alphabet, consisting of 33 letters.

The following table gives their majuscule forms, along with SAMPA values for each letter's typical sound:

Old letters that have been abolished at one time or another but occur in this article include /ě:/ or /e/, i /i/, and /ja/ or /'a/. The yers ъ and ь were originally pronounced as ultra-short or reduced /ŭ/, /ĭ/.

Orthography

Main article: Russian orthography

Russian spelling is reasonably phonetic in practice. It is in fact a balance between phonetics, morphology, etymology, and grammar, and, like that of most living languages, has its share of inconsistencies and controversial points.

The current spelling follows the major reform of 1918, and the final codification of 1956. An update proposed in the late 1990's has met a hostile reception, and has not been formally adopted.

The punctuation, originally based on Byzantine Greek, was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reformulated on the French and German models.

Main article: Russian phonetics.

Main article: Russian grammar.

Russian has preserved an Indo-European synthetic-inflexional structure, although considerable levelling has taken place.

Russian grammar encompasses

• a highly synthetic morphology
• a syntax that, for the literary language, is the conscious fusion of three elements:
  • a polished vernacular foundation;
  • a Church Slavonic inheritance;
  • a Western European style.

The spoken language has been influenced by the literary, but continues to preserve characteristic forms. The dialects show various non-standard grammatical features, some of which are archaisms or descendants of old forms since discarded by the literary language.

See the History section for an account of the successive foreign influences on the Russian language.

The total number of words in Russian is difficult to reckon because of the ability to agglutinate and create manifold compounds, diminutives, etc. (see Word Formation).

The number of listed words or entries in some of the major dictionaries published during the last two centuries, and the total vocabulary of Pushkin, are as follows:

Philologists have estimated that the language today may contain as many as 350,000 to 500,000 words.

The language of abuse and invective

Apparently, the ability to curse effectively has always been recognized as a form of art not only in certain quarters of society, but even by the more liberal-minded literati. For example, as far back as in the nineteenth-century naval yarns of Staniukovich, "artistic invective" (артистическая ругань /artistitS'eskaja rugan'/) keeps coming out of the sailors' mouths, though it is never spelled out. The ability to agglutinate has produced the so-called "three-decker curse" (трёхэтажный мат /tr'oxEtaZn1j mat/).

It is interesting that the modern obscenities appear to have taken on their meaning in the eighteenth century, as euphemisms for words since lost. For example, the word блядь /bl'ad'/ ("whore"), is today considered extraordinarily offensive. It anciently meant "error, sin", as a concept in the high style, occurs in scripture in that sense, and may perhaps be heard during the liturgy.

Proverbs

Main article: List of Russian proverbs

The spoken language is replete with many hundreds of proverbs (пословица/poslov'itsa/) and set phrases (поговоркa/pogovorka/). These were already tabulated by the seventeenth century, and collected and studied in the nineteenth and twentieth. Many have entered the literature, with the folk-tales being an especially fertile source. Unlike English, in which many clichés and sayings appear to have gone from the literary to the vernacular, the tendency in Russian has been in the other direction.

The received opinion is that the proverbs and set phrases show something of the fatalistic nature of the people. Here are a few of them:

• в тридевятом царстве /v trid'ev'atom tsartsv'e/ "in the twenty-seventh kingdom" = "somewhere over the rainbow" (applied by Goncharov when Putiatin's expedition entered Nagasaki harbour in 1853.)
• со времён царя Гороха /so vrem'on tsar'a goroxa/ "since the times of Tsar Green-pea" = "since time immemorial"
• ни к селу, ни к городу /ni k s'elu, ni k gorodu/ "neither town nor city" = "of no use or relevance whatsoever"
• до Бога высоко, до Царя далеко /do boga v1soko, do tsar'a dal'eko/ "God is up high, the Tsar is far away"
• курица не птица, баба не человек /kuritsa n'e ptitsa, baba n'e tS'elov'ek/ "A chicken isn't a bird, a woman is not a human being"
• голь на выдумку хитра /gol' na v1dumku Citra/ "bareness is full of cunning" = "necessity is the mother of invention"
• хоть кол на голове теши /xot' kol na golov'e teS1/ "even if you whittled a spike on his head..." (said of someone ultimately stubborn or recalcitrant)
• сделал дело, гуляй смело /sd'elal delo, gul'aj sm'elo/ "task accomplished, disport bravely"

Main article : History of Russian language See also : Reforms of Russian orthography

The history of Russian language may be divided into the following periods.

• Origins
• The Kievan period (9th-11th centuries)
• Feudal breakup (12th-14th centuries)
• The Moscovite period (15th-17th centuries)
• Empire (18th-19th centuries)
• Soviet period and beyond (20th century)

The following excerpts illustrate (very briefly) the development of the literary language. They have been chosen because they are to this day presented in Russian schools and universities as illuminations of linguistic and social history.

NOTE. The spelling has been partly modernized. The translations attempt to be as literal as possible; they are not literary.

Primary Chronicle

c. 1110, from the Laurentian Codex, 1377

Се пов