Russian

Also known as: Russian, Russkij

Russian (русский язык russkii yazyk) is an East Slavic Indo-European language with ~150M L1 and ~260M total speakers (the latter includes large post-Soviet L2 communities across Belarus, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia). It is the largest Slavic language by speakers, official in the Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, and one of the six UN working languages. Sister to Belarusian and Ukrainian within East Slavic. Written in Cyrillic (33 letters; the alphabet derives from Old Church Slavonic via the 9th-c. mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius, with Russian-specific reforms under Peter the Great in 1708 and Soviet orthography reform 1918). Grammatically conservative: 6 cases (nominative-genitive-dative-accusative-instrumental-prepositional), 3 grammatical genders, full nominal and adjectival inflection, and a hallmark "complete-vs-incomplete" verbal aspect system in which most verbs come in perfective/imperfective pairs (писать pisat' "to write [imperfective]" vs. написать napisat' "to write [perfective]"). Palatalization is phonemic — most consonants distinguish hard/soft (т tʲ vs. ть t). Russian has the foundational Pushkin canon (1799-1837), plus Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Akhmatova, Pasternak (Nobel 1958), Solzhenitsyn (1970), and Brodsky (1987).