Russian language

Russian (русский язык, Russkij jazyk) is the East Slavic language of Indo-European language family. Its closest relatives are Ukrainian and Belarusian (also in the East Slavic group). In many places in Ukraine and Belarus, these languages are spoken interchangeably. The next closest relatives to Russian are the West Slavic languages, especially Polish and Slovak and then the South Slavic languages (Bulgarian). The modern Russian alphabet is a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet and contains 33 letters. 164 million people consider Russian as their mother tongue. 114 million people speak Russian as a second language. Russian is the most widespread language in the Eurasian continent, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe. More than a quarter of the all academic papers are written in Russian. During the Soviet era Russian was compulsorily taught in all countries of the Warsaw Pact. Russian language is an official language in: Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, Moldova (in the region Gaugazja and Transnistria), Georgia (Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Ukraine (Crimea - an autonomous republic). t is widely spoken language in Ukraine, Latvia and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics of the USSR. Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. It is also the official language of the Commonwealth of Independent States and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The language is spoken in the following countries: Russia, Belarus, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan