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Russian: Russian Language
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Among the first to study Russian dialects was Lomonosov in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth, Vladimir Dal 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
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Russian is the largest of the Slavic languages. Along with Belarusian and Ukrainian, it belongs to the East Slavic group of the Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. Russian is primarily spoken in Russia and, to a lesser extent, in the other countries that were once part of the Soviet Union, as well in Eastern Europe. According to Ethnologue, there are 117,863,645 speakers of Russian in Russia alone. It is ... spoken in Canada, China, Finland,Germany, Greece, India, Israel, and the U.S. It is estimated that it is the primary language of over 145 million speakers worldwide (Ethnologue).
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Russian belongs to the Indo-European language family and is a relative of such languages as Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, as well as Celtic and the modern Germanic languages which include French and English. As a spoken language, Russian's closest cousins are Ukrainian and Belarusian. Russian is used mainly in Russia and, to a lesser extent, in the former republics of old Soviet Union. There are a large number of dialects in the Russian language. Some linguists place them into two main regional groups, "Northern" and "Southern," with Moscow representing the transitional zone between the two. Others separate the language into three distinct groups, Northern, Central and Southern, with Moscow representing the Central region.
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If learning the Russian alphabet is not especially difficult, learning to speak the language is something else again. Russian is notorious for its long personal and place names (e.g., Nepomnyashchiy, Dnepropetrovsk), for its long words (upotrehienie—use, dostoprimchatelnosti—sights, zhenonenavistniehestvo—misogyny), and for its unusual con-sonant clusters (vzvod—platoon, tknut'—to poke, vstreeha—meeting). Nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and numbers are declined in six cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and preposi-tional or locative. The Russian verb has two aspects, each represented by a separate infinitive-the imperfective to indicate a continuing action, and the perfective to indicate an action already completed or to be completed. The genders number three, masculine, feminine, and neuter, with a different declensional pattern for each (though the neuter is similar to the masculine), and a fourth one for the plural. The stress in Russian is particularly difficult, impossible to predict in an unfamiliar word, and frequently shifting in the course of declensions or conjugations.
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Russian phonology and syntax (especially in northern dialects) have ... been influenced to some extent by the numerous Finnic languages of the Finno-Ugric subfamily: Merya, Moksha, Muromian, the language of the Meshchera, Veps, et cetera. These languages, some of them now extinct, used to be spoken right in the center and in the north of what is now the European part of Russia. They came in contact with Eastern Slavic as far back as the early Middle Ages and eventually served as substratum for the modern Russian language. The Russian dialects spoken north, north-east and north-west of Moscow have a considerable number of words of Finno-Ugric origin.[3][4] Over the course of centuries, the vocabulary and literary style of Russian have also been influenced by Tatar language, Polish, Latin, German, Dutch, French, English and other Western European languages.[5]
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Early borrowings into Russian from Old Church Slavonic, Greek, and Latin were associated with religious sources, and from Altaic languages associated with the Mongol invasion. Later borrowings came from French, German, Dutch, Italian, and English. Today, the major source of borrowing, particularly in the areas of scientific, political, and technical terminology, is English.
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