Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of three living members of the East Slavic languages. The language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.
History of the Russian Language
In the 6th century the Slav tribes started migrating from old Poland. They expanded to the west to the river Elbe and to the south to the Adriatic Sea where they most part of the Balkans. By the 10th century three Slavic language groups emerged: Western, Southern and Eastern. Eastern Slavic gave rise to the present-day languages known as Ukranian, Belorussian and Russian. These three retained most features in common especially in grammar. The language was known as Old Slavonic (the language was only used in written form). In the 9th century, two missionaries - Cyril and Methodius - were asked to write down the scriptures in Old Church Slavonic and to preach Christianity to the people of Moravia. Before they set out for Moravia, Cyril invented the Cyrillic alphabet. The Cyrillic alphabet is closely based on the Greek alphabet, with additional letters to represent Slavic sounds not found in Greek.
In Russia, Cyrillic got its written form in the early Middle Ages. Peter the Great simplified the forms of letters removing some that were appropriate only to Greek. More meaningless letters were expunged in 1918, leaving the alphabet as it is today.
Old Church Slavonic remained the written language until the middle of the eighteenth century. M. Lomonosov, after whom MGU (the Moscow State University) is named, distinguished three styles:
- 1) High Style - Church Slavonic, to be used for poetics and religion.
- 2) Middle Style - to be used for lyric poetry, prose and science.
- 3) Low Style - to be used in personal correspondence and in low comedy.
The Middle Style had features of both East Slavonic and Church Slavonic formed the basis of the modern Russian language. Standard Russian based on the Moscow dialect became the official language in the 19
th century.
Now Russian is the most spoken language of all Slavic languages and is one of the major languages in the world. It is also an official language of the UN. Recently 153 million people listed Russian as their mother tongue and another 61 million indicated they spoke it fluently as a second language. The number of Russian speakers world-wide could be around 220 million.
