Russian language is the official language in Russian Federation which has 146 million population based on Russian Government latest census on 1st January 2018. Russian language is also spoken in few countries such as Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and other republics former USSR. Russian language is among the official languages of the world (WHO, IAEA, UN, UNESCO) and regional international (brick, EURASEC, CSTO, CIS, SCO) organizations.
Origin
The origins of the Russian language goes back to ancient times. Old Russian language existed from the VII to the XIV Century. The Cyrillic alphabet as the form of Russian written language is made by Byzantine missionary St. Cyril with his brother Methodius, created the first Slavic alphabet by translating Greek religious text called Galagolitic.
Moscow language formation
The basis of the Russian literary language was the Moscow speech with characteristic features: the vowel reduction of unstressed syllables; explosive consonant g; the ending -ово (-ovo), -ево (-evo) in the genitive singular masculine and neuter in the pronominal declension; the hard ending -t in verbs the 3rd person of the present and future tenses; forms of pronouns me, you, themselves.
The beginning of printing in the XVI century became one of the most significant companies that contributed to the formation of the literary language of Muscovy. In the XVII—XVIII centuries South-Western Russia was a kind of a mediator between Moscow Russia and Western Europe. The Polish language became a provider of European scientific, legal, administrative, technical and secular-household terms.
Mikhail Lomonosov
The second half of the XVIII century was marked by Gallomania — the official language of the court-aristocratic circles and salons of the nobility was French. In this era Russian society is at the peak of Europeanization process. A new framework of norms of the Russian literary language was laid by the great Russian scientist and poet Mikhail Lomonosov. He united all varieties of Russian speech: mandative language, the living speech with its regional variations, the styles of folk poetry — and recognized form of Russian language-based literature. Lomonosov established the system of three styles of literature: easy, medium, and high style.
Further, creators and transmitters of the great Russian language were made by the representatives from the literature of different genres: G. R. Derzhavin, I. I. Novikov, A. N. Radishchev, A. P. Sumarokov, D. I. Fonvizin. They discovered in the literature of the new means of expression and new treasures of the living word, from the meanings of the previous words. They were replaced by V. V. Kapnist, N. M. Karamzin, N. I. Novikov. It is interesting that the language of N. M. Karamzin in terms of quality and style comparable to the language in which he wrote Cicero, Horace, and Tacitus.
Alexander Pushkin era
Pushkin brilliantly played the role of the national poet and allowed to question about the Russian language since he becomes a part of the family of Western European languages. Rejecting stylistic limitations, a combination of Europeanism and significant forms of popular speech, the poet created a vivid picture of the Russian soul, the Slavic world, using all the richness and depth of colors of the Russian language. A. S. Pushkin was supported and continued by M. Lermontov and N. Gogol.
There were four trends in the development of Russian language of the mid XIX-early XX century:
- The restriction of the Slavic-Russian tradition in the circle of the literary norm;
- The convergence of the literary language with live oral speech;
- The extension of the literary use of words and phrases from different professional dialects and jargons;
- The redistribution of functions and influences of different genres, the development of the genre of the realist novel (I. A. Goncharov, F. M. Dostoevsky, L. N. Tolstoy, I. S. Turgenev), the story (Chekhov); the predominance of the socio-political and philosophical issues.
Language features
The structure of the modern Russian language has a number of features that distinguish it from other languages of the world. Russian is an inflected language, that is, there are inflections. Flexion — part of the word (the end) expressing grammatical meaning in the inflection (declension, conjugation). It is a synthetic language: the word United and the lexical and grammatical meanings. You can read Conjugation in Russian Language also Declension of The Russian Ordinal Numbers
In the Russian language, normal forms are: for nouns, it is nominative case singular, for the adjective is nominative case singular masculine, of verbs, participles and gerunds it is a verb in the infinitive.
Standard stands out 10 basic parts of speech: noun, adjective, name, numeral, pronoun, verb, adverb, prepositions, conjunctions, particle, interjection. As a separate part of speech the highlighted word status categories (as a group of adverbs), participles and gerunds (as a special form of the verb), modal words (as introductory elements in a sentence).
To learn the facts and history of Russian language you will have a better understanding before dig deeper into their language. If you just begin your learning in Russian language you can first learn their beginner words, common greetings, and the advantage of learning Russian language itself.