Russian language

Russian Language

Official language of:	Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Crimea (part of Ukraine), Abkhazia, South Ossetia. It is also one of the official languages of the United Nations.
Spoken in:	Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldavia, Armenia, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Kyrgyzstan, Crimea (part of Ukraine), Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Poland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Albania, Finland, Mongolia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Tajikistan
Ranking:	The Summer Institute for Linguistics (SIL) Ethnologue Survey lists the following as the top languages by population: (number of native speakers in parentheses) 1. Chinese (937,132,000) 2. Spanish (332,000,000) 3. English (322,000,000) 4. Bengali (189,000,000) 5. Hindi/Urdu (182,000,000) 6. Arabic (174,950,000) 7. Portuguese (170,000,000) 8. Russian (170,000,000) 9. Japanese (125,000,000) 10. German (98,000,000) If we add the secondary speaker populations to the primary speaker populations, we get the following (and I believe more accurate) list: (number of speakers in parentheses) 1. Mandarin Chinese (1.12 billion) 2. English (480 million) 3. Spanish (320 million) 4. Russian (285 million) 5. French (265 million) 6. Hindi/Urdu (250 million) 7. Arabic (221 million) 8. Portuguese (188 million) 9. Bengali (185 million) 10. Japanese (133 million)
Language family:	Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages. Within the Slavic family, Russian is one of three living members of the East Slavic group, the other two being Belarusian and Ukrainian.
Level of difficulty:	According to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, Russian is classified as a level III language in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers, requiring approximately 780 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency.

< Prev