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| VOCABULARY DATABASE > RUSSIAN > INFORMATION |
Russian is an eastern Slavic language, spoken by some 280 million people, half of which are native speakers. Although the official policy in the former Soviet republics is to replace Russian with other languages, it still plays the role as a non-official lingua franca in parts of Central Asia. There are sizable Russian-speaking communities elsewhere. In particular, Russian is an important minority language in Israel (approx. 750,000 persons).
Early literature in present-day Russia was written in Old Church Slavonic. It was not until the 17th century that Russian achieved a high level as a literary language. In the 19th c., it produced some of the masterworks of world literature. Russian was an important language in 20th c. politics, and is still one of six official languages of the United Nations and one of the four major languages in scientific publications.
Russian is an inflected language. Noun declension includes six cases. As in other Slavic languages, the loss of tenses in the verbal system has been offset by using different verb forms to tell between finished and unfinished actions (verb aspect). The language is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Like other Slavic languages, it includes palatal consonants, but there are no separate glyphs for them, since palatalization is induced by the type of vowel following a consonant. Its vocabulary includes loanwords from Greek, Latin, French, German, and more recently English.
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