ENCYCLOPEDIA: RUSSIAN LANGUAGE,
official
language of Russia. Russian was the lingua franca of the Russian Empire and the
Soviet Union; it is still used as a second language in the other former Soviet
republics. It is also known as Great Russian and forms, with Belarussian and
Ukrainian, the eastern branch of the 
SLAVIC LANGUAGES, (q.v.).
Russian includes three groups of dialects: northern, southern, and central, the
last named a transitional group combining northern and southern features. The
southern and central dialects are distinguished by the so-called akan’je,
coalescence of certain vowels outside of stress. The standard Russian is based
on a central dialect of Moscow. It is one of the five official languages of the
UN.
The Russian language uses the Cyrillic alphabet; it has 33 letters. Spelling is basically, though not completely, phonetic, and the rules of pronunciation are few and simple. Russian has no article, either definite or indefinite. The three grammatical genders into which all Russian nouns fall are the masculine, the feminine, and the neuter. The nouns are declined according to case and number. The six cases are the nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental, and prepositional, and the two numbers are the singular and the plural. Adjectives agree with nouns in gender, case, and number. The verb has three tenses, present, past, and future; in addition it has the category of aspect. The two aspects are the imperfective, presenting the action as a process of repetition, and the perfective, presenting the action as a unified whole, usually from the point of view of its completion. The distinction in aspect is preserved in all three moods, indicative, subjunctive-conditional, and imperative, and in participles, both adverbial and adjectival, the latter being either passive or active. Due to declension and conjugation, the word order in Russian is not as strict as in English. A typical feature of Russian vocabulary is large families of words derived from the same root by means of various prefixes and suffixes.
Writing began at the end of the 10th century after the conversion of the Slavic peoples in the area to Christianity. The written language introduced by the missionaries was Old Church Slavonic, also called Old Bulgarian or Old Slavonic. When introduced, Old Church Slavonic was understood by Eastern Slavs. Gradually, however, the difference between the written and the spoken language increased, the spoken language undergoing simplifications in its phonemic (sound) and morphological (word-forming) structure.
Old Church Slavonic continued to be used as the literary language until the end of the 17th century, and only in administrative and legal matters was writing completely free from Old Church Slavonic influences.
In
the 18th century the secularization of culture that occurred during the reign
of the Russian emperor Peter the Great caused a great upheaval in language. The
old written language, whether the essentially ecclesiastical Old Church
Slavonic or the administrative language, was unable to encompass the many
scientific, technological, cultural, and political concepts that Peter
introduced, and a written language developed that was actually a mixture of
styles, including the archaic Old Church Slavonic, the vernacular, and the
recently borrowed Western elements. A new norm developed that reached its
present state in the first half of the 19th
century. N.O., NICHOLAS OZEROV,
M.A.
For further information on this topic, see the Bibliography, section 350. Language.
ENCYCLOPEDIA: SLAVIC LANGUAGES,
subfamily
of the Indo-European family of languages (see INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES,
Today, the Slavic languages are spoken by more than 250 million people in
eastern and central Europe, in most of the Balkan peninsula, and in northern
Asia. The Slavic languages share certain important traits with the Baltic
languages, and some scholars place both language groups into a Balto-Slavic
subfamily. The modern Slavic languages are divided into three branches:
East Slavic: Russian, or Great Russian; Ukrainian, also Little Russian or Ruthenian; and Belarussian or White Russian
South Slavic: eastern group—Bulgarian and Macedonian; western group—Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian
West Slavic: Czech-Slovak group—Czech, Slovak, and other dialects, such as Bohemian and Moravian; Lekhitic group—Polish and the various Kashubian dialects (remnants of an older Pomeranian language); Sorbian or Lusatian group—High and Low Sorbian (Wendish)
Some
modern Slavic languages (Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, and Polish) are written in
the Latin alphabet, and their speakers are predominantly Roman Catholic. Other
Slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarussian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian)
use variations of the CYRILLIC ALPHABET, (q.v.)
as a result of the influence of the Eastern Orthodox church. The Serbo-Croatian
language is called Serbian when written by Serbs in the Cyrillic alphabet and
Croatian when written by Croats in the Latin alphabet. Serbs are Eastern
Orthodox and Croats are Roman Catholics. The invention of the Cyrillic
alphabet, an adaptation of the Greek alphabet, is attributed traditionally to
Saint Cyril, a Greek missionary. It is related to the Glagolithic alphabet
created by Sts. Cyril and Methodius to translate the New Testament into the
language of the Slavic peoples who, by the 9th century, had begun to embrace
Christianity. The language written in this alphabet is known as Old Slavonic or
Old Church Slavonic and is used as a liturgical language. For most of the
Middle Ages Old Slavonic was the language of the ecclesiastical literature and
of official and diplomatic documents.
For
more information, see separate articles on many of the languages mentioned. See
also SLAVIC PEOPLES,; WENDS,; YUGOSLAV LANGUAGES,.
ENCYCLOPEDIA: CYRILLIC ALPHABET,
alphabet
developed in the 9th century for the use of Eastern Orthodox Slavs. It was
based on Greek characters, and with modifications it constitutes the present
Russian, Ukrainian, White Russian, Serbian, and Bulgarian alphabets. Although
it was traditionally ascribed to St. Cyril, scholars now believe that the
Cyrillic alphabet was devised by one of Cyril's followers. It is related to the
Glagolitic alphabet (also attributed to St. Cyril) used by Roman Catholic Slavs
until the 1600s and surviving today only in the Slavonic liturgy of some Roman
Catholic communities in Slovenia and Croatia. See ALPHABET.