Russian

Russian belongs to the East Slavic group of the Slavic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. It is spoken by about 170 million people as a first language and used by at least an additional 100 million as a second language throughout the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Closely related to Russian are the other East Slavic tongues, Ukrainian and Belarussian.

After the 12 century Church Slavonic, a liturgical language, had much influence on the modern Slavic languages, particularly on the Russian literary language. In the late 18th and early 19th century, writings of the great Russian author Aleksandr Pushkin played a significant role in elevating Russian's status from a spoken vernacular to a literary language. Literary Russian is based on the dialect used in and around the city of Moscow.