Phone 206.325.4109 info@sealang.org
| << back to Russian Home |
Russian Language Profile РУССКИЙ |
Within the Indo-European language family, Russian is the most widely
spoken of the Slavic languages. It is the national language of Russia,
is one of the five official languages of the United Nations, and is
spoken as a first or second language in the now independent states of
the former Soviet Union. These Russian-speaking republics include the
Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Latvia, Moldova,
Estonia, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, Armenia, Turkmenistan, Georgia and Tajikistan.
According to tradition, the Russian alphabet was devised by the missionaries
Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century. First used for liturgical
purposes - the translation of the Christian scriptures into Old Church
Slavonic - it was later adapted for writing Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian
and even some non-Slavic languages of central Asia. While linguists
distinguish three major dialects within Russia, the basis of modern
Russian is the dialect of Moscow, since the fifteenth century the cultural
and economic center of the country. The rapid westernization of Russian
culture under Peter the Great (1682-1725) and the adoption into Russian
of many words from French and German led to an intense internal debate
as to what constituted the national language. The writer Alexander Pushkin
(1799-1837), with his vast literary output of lyrical and epic poetry,
essays, criticism, folk songs and fairy tales, achieved a synthesis
of old and new Russian and settled the debate. Russian literature, founded
on and made possible by Pushkin's legacy, is one of the richest and
most expressive in the world. It includes such writers as Gogol, Tolstoy,
Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gorky and has been a strong impetus to
the study of Russian. The contributions of Russians in the twentieth
and twenty first centuries in the fields of art, music, dance and drama,
science and exploration have been considerable. During the Cold War,
the study and knowledge of Russian was of obvious importance for political
reasons. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian remains
one of the world's most important languages. |