About Learning Russian with Berlitz
Russian is spoken across the vast expanse of Russia: still, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the largest country in the world. Spanning eleven time zones, it extends from Kaliningrad, facing the Baltic Sea, to easternmost Siberia, facing the Pacific Ocean and the Bering Strait.
Of the country’s 145 million people, about 120 million are native Russians, with many of the rest speaking the language with varying degrees of fluency. Between 25 and 30 million Russians also live in the newly independent states that were once part of the Soviet Union, the numbers by country as follows:
| Ukraine |
|
15 million |
|
Estonia |
|
300,000 |
| Kazakhstan |
|
5 million |
|
Lithuania |
|
300,000 |
| Belarus |
|
3 1/2 million |
|
Turkmenistan |
|
250,000 |
| Uzbekistan |
|
1 million |
|
Georgia |
|
150,000 |
| Latvia |
|
750,000 |
|
Azerbaijan |
|
150,000 |
| Kyrgyzstan |
|
600,000 |
|
Tajikistan |
|
100,000 |
| Moldova |
|
500,000 |
|
|
|
|
|
There are also now about 500,000 Russian speakers in Israel, 250,000 in the United States, and 40,000 in Canada.
Russian is the most important of the Slavic languages, a branch of the Indo-European family. It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet, which is based largely on the Greek, and named after a Greek scholar and missionary named Cyril who lived in the 9th century. While tradition holds that he and his brother Methodius were its inventors, it is now generally believed that they actually invented a different alphabet called Glagolitic, which is older but no longer in use. Cyrillic was probably invented by someone else at a later date.
English words of Russian origin include vodka, tsar, samovar, ruble, pogrom, troika, steppe, and tundra. The word sputnik entered the language in 1957, while the 1980s produced glasnost and perestroyka. The post-Soviet period has seen a huge influx of foreign, mostly English, words into Russian from the fields of business, politics, and computers, as well as from everyday life. A few among many are konsalting (consulting), defolt (default), konsensus (consensus), khaker (hacker), and killer (pronounced keeler). Legislation has been proposed to mandate the use of Russian words instead of their foreign counterparts but, as is the case in other countries, it is not likely to get very far.
Boris Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958.
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