Russian is the first language of more than 150,000 people in Azerbaijan, predominantly ethnic Russians, as well as of Russified Azeris, Ukrainians, Jews, and other minorities.In 1994, 38% of Azerbaijanis spoke Russian fluently as a second language. In the 20th century, Russian was a mandatory language taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other countries that used to be satellites of the USSR. Words change depending on both their gender and function in the sentence. His writings, by combining the colloquial and Church Slavonic styles, put an end to the considerable controversy that had developed as to which style of the language was best for literary uses. [41] It is also regarded by the United States Intelligence Community as a "hard target" language, due to both its difficulty to master for English speakers and its critical role in U.S. world policy. Где есть потребность в изучении русского языка", Iliev, Iv. The Russian alphabet has many systems of character encoding. Russian was also taught extensively in those countries lying within the Soviet sphere of influence, especially in eastern Europe, in the second half of the 20th century. [75] In Nikolaevsk, Alaska Russian is more spoken than English. The usage and status of the language (as of 2021 Ukrainian is the only state language of Ukraine) is the subject of political disputes within Ukrainian society.. Belarusian ць, дзь, or Polish ć, dź). The Modern Russian Language; As the most widely spoken language on the European continent, Russian is a Slavic language that is currently spoken by about 164 million people worldwide. [48], In Estonia, Russian is spoken by 29.6% of the population according to a 2011 estimate from the World Factbook,[49] and is officially considered a foreign language. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. [71] The Israeli press and websites regularly publish material in Russian and there are Russian newspapers, television stations, schools, and social media outlets based in the country. Russian grammar encompasses: The spoken language has been influenced by the literary one but continues to preserve characteristic forms. Russian is a Slavic language of the Indo-European family.All Indo-European languages are descendants of a single prehistoric language, reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic era. – "Was it you who ate the cookie?") The official language in Moscow and Novgorod, and later, in the growing Muscovy, was Church Slavonic, which evolved from Old Church Slavonic and remained the literary language for centuries, until the Petrine age, when its usage became limited to biblical and liturgical texts. Omissions? It is a descendant of the language used in Kievan Rus', a loose conglomerate of East Slavic tribes from the late 9th to the mid 13th centuries. Corrections? All the obsolete 8-bit encodings are rarely used in the communication protocols and text-exchange data formats, having been mostly replaced with UTF-8. [65], In Kazakhstan, Russian is not a state language, but according to article 7 of the Constitution of Kazakhstan its usage enjoys equal status to that of the Kazakh language in state and local administration. The formation of the unified and centralized Russian state in 15th and 16th centuries and the gradual (re)emergence of a common political, economic, and cultural space have created the need for a common standard language. [72] There is an Israeli TV channel mainly broadcasting in Russian with Israel Plus.