The Russian Language

Origin and History: Spoken

Language
Around 3500-2500 BC the Slavic tribes
separated from the Indo-European tribes
and formed their own language, known
today as Common-Slavonic.
Around 500 AD, the Common-Slavonic
speaking people separated into Western,
Eastern and Southern groups and the
Eastern group settled in what is presentday Ukraine.
From here the Eastern Slavic language,
also known as Old Russian broke into

History continued: Written

Language
The

three sub groups of Old

Russian were very similar
grammatically and all three
sub languages used a
common written language
known as Old-Slavonic (used
in its written form only).
Old Slavonic was later
thrown off in dominance but
still places a large role in
literary Russian today

Roots of Russian

The Cyrillic Alphabet

Two

priests (Constantine
and Methodius) were
required to write down the
scriptures in Old Church
Slavonic and created the
Cyrillic alphabet.
The Cyrillic alphabet is
based off of Greek with
additional letters to
represent Slavic sounds (the
alphabet has been modified
since but is still what
Russians use today).

Language Changes and

Influences
When Peter the Great undertook to
Westernize Russia in the 18th century,
the Russian language was subject to
Western influences and absorbed a
number of foreign words.
Russian is based off many languages
including: Altaic languages
(particularly Mongolian because of
their invasion in 1300, Byzantine
Greek, Gothic and Old Norse
languages-Danish/Swedish)
There has also been a large amount of
phonological and phonetic changes
(vowels and sound shifts)

Soviet Union Era

1922-1991
Soviets wanted to spread
communism and in order to
do that, they needed to
improve the high illiteracy
rates
They required education and
literacy classes which were
mainly taught in Russian,
causing the Russian
language to spread across
Soviet territories
Russification: form of
cultural assimilation process

Where Russian is spoken

The

majority of Russian
speakers are found in Russia,
but due to the influence of the
USSR, many other countries are
familiar with and speak Russian
(Armenia, Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania, Ukraine, ect.)
Russian is one of the official
languages of the United Nations
Total number of Russian
speakers in the world is around
255-285 million

Isogloss

Current Events
Botched

Law could Close

Hundreds of Foreign Firms Rep
Offices in Russia
http://
www.themoscowtimes.com/business
/article/botched-law-could-clos
e-hundreds-of-foreign-companies
-rep-offices-in-russia/517266.h
tml
Putins Four Dirty Words
http://

Sources
http://

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the
_Russian_language
http://
linguistics.byu.edu/classes/ling450ch
/reports/russian.html
http://
www.studyrussian.com/russian-langua
ge/history-of-the-russian-language.
html
https://www.foreigntranslations.com/