The Russian language is the official language of the Russian Federation (which is the correct name for Russia), although there are more than 140 other languages and dialects. These include Turkic, Mongolian, Tungusic, Finnic, Samoyed, various Caucasian and a few Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages.

The variety of languages is not surprising considering that the Russian Federation is the world's largest country - nearly twice the size of the USA. It stretches from Finland in the west, to China in the south to the Bering Strait in the east (facing the USA state of Alaska) and spans eleven time zones. Although the slowly declining population numbers only around 141 million, they descend from more than 100 ethnic groups.

Russian is often considered to consist of 2 different dialects based on regions – the “Northern and the “Southern”. Some language authorities consider that a 3rd dialect also exists - the “Central” dialect which is based on the city and areas surrounding Moscow. As in other languages, this may mean that 2 people who have spoken the same language all of their lives have difficulty understanding each other. One example of this is that people who have lived all their lives in South-West France often have trouble understanding people from the capital city of France – Paris.

Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, which is not based on Latin as many of the European languages (including English) are, so written Russian is not as easy to understand as other languages. As one example, "restaurant" written in Cyrillic is "ресторан". Cyrillic writing systems had to be invented for some of the other languages in use in Russia – this was done in the early 1900’s.

01: А 12: K 23: Х
02: Б 13: Л 24: Ц
03: В 14: М 25: Ч
04: Г 15: Н 26: Ш
05: Д 16: О 27: Щ
06: Е 17: П 28: Ъ
07: Ё 18: Р 29: Ы
08: Ж 19: С 30: Ь
09: З 20: Т 31: Э
10: И 21: У 32: Ю
11: Й 22: Ф 33: Я

Just to complicate the written language a little, transliteration has sometimes been used in the past to get around the computer problem of the unavailability of Cyrillic keyboards outside Russia. This has led to words such as "мороз" being written as "moroz" (meaning "freeze" in English) and "мышь" becoming "mysh" (mouse). However, this is not happening as often now as computers are now able to handle more alphabet systems, ranging from Latin to Hindi.

Russian spelling had a major reform in 1918, but a proposed update in the late 1990’s has not been formally adopted.

Spoken Russian

The Russian Language has 5 vowels. Each vowel can be written using different letters in different situations, depending on if the preceding consonant is palatalized or not. (This refers to the way the letter is pronounced. Palatalising is the process of lifting the centre of the tongue towards the roof of the mouth while speaking).

Standard Russian uses heavy stress and has a moderate variation in pitch. Stressed vowels are generally lengthened slightly, but un-stressed ones are shortened.

An article on Russian pronunciation can be found in Wikipedia.

In some languages, it is reasonably easy to determine how a word should be pronounced, but as has been seen, this is not so in Russian. To determine how to pronounce a written word takes a great deal of study of the technical details of the language, unless one is receiving live or real-time coaching of some sort. Fortunately, there is an alternative. There are a large number of courses available online which place their emphasis on speaking Russian rather than writing Russian. This makes learning the language easier as once it is possible to speak the language, recognising the written form follows on more naturally.

Concentrate on learning to speak Russian first then start to learn written Russian.

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