The state language in any country is constitutionally assigned the highest legal status in comparison with others, and therefore it is the language of the basic law of the state. Most often, it becomes the language of the most numerous people. There are countries in which there is only one state language. In Russia, state languages for individual regions are added to it, and each autonomous republic has its own additional one. Exceptions are Karelia, whose language uses a script based on the Latin alphabet, and therefore a separate federal law is required to give it the status of a state.
Some statistics and facts
- 136 languages on the territory of the Russian Federation were declared endangered by UNESCO in 2006.
- Russian, among several others, is the official language of the UN.
- In the Union of Independent States, official agreements are also signed in Russian.
- In addition to the state language in Russia, there are 37 state languages in the republics and 15 languages with an official status.
- 57% of the country's residents speak foreign languages at least at the minimum level. More than a third of them are in English.
In total, several hundred languages are spoken in Russia, belonging to 15 families. The most numerous are in Indo-European (89%), Altai (7%), Caucasian (2%) and Ural (2%).
great and powerful
The Russian language has more than once become not only a tool for creation, but even a hero of literary works. He is called great and mighty, because more than 130 million people speak the language of Pushkin and Dostoevsky. It ranks sixth in the world in terms of the total number of speakers (about 260 million people) and eighth in terms of the number of native speakers. The largest number of Russian speakers abroad live in Europe, the USA, Canada and Israel.
Russian is the second state language not only in Russia, but also in Belarus, and in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan it is one of the official ones.
History and modernity
There are three periods in the history of our language: Old Russian, when Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian languages developed together, Old Russian and the period of the national Russian language. The Russian writing system is based on an alphabet called the Cyrillic alphabet.
Russian dialects today are grouped into northern and southern dialects, and between them are Central Russian dialects, which form the basis of the literary modern Russian language.
