Why us?

Russian

“The Russian language is great and mighty”.

This quote by Lev Tolstoy is probably the first thing that comes to mind of Russian speakers thinking about their native language.

Lately, English has had quite a significant influence on Russian. Company names, business-related lexicon, professional terminology… almost every “modern” term has an English source. Sometimes, words that already exist in Russian are changed according to the English analogs and we encounter many words that a part of them has a Russian or other Slavic origin, while the suffix and/or the ending have and English origin. For example, the adjective “chitabel’ny” (‘читабельный’), which means “readable” (or understandable for reading”) is composed of the Russian verb “chitat’” (‘читать’), which means “to read” and the English suffix “-able-“, which became “abel’” in Russian. Nowadays, in many cases of words constructed in such manner, even experienced philologists find it hard to define the origin of the word. However, while using such words may be more useful is aspects of casual conversation, it is far from being “proper Russian”, which is also known as “The Russian Literature Language”. Probably because in classical literature you will rarely encounter words that were significantly influenced by foreign languages.

Several of the 33 letters composing the Russian alphabet are similar to Greek, while the ‘soft sign’ (‘ь’) ‘’hard sign’ (‘ъ’) and a couple of other letters will get your tongue twisted. Have you ever paid attention to non-Russian speaking actors saying a few lines in Russian? Well, even the most seasoned veterans of the dramatic arts mostly fail to sound as if they could really speak Russian.

The majority of Russians speak Russian as their first and only language. Those who come from other parts of the former Soviet Union are mostly bilingual, while the second language is of their country of origin. Such languages include Ukrainian, Moldovan, Belarusian, Georgian, Armenian and many other.

One of the most unique aspects of the Russian language is its extremely wide pool of expressions and sentence construction options, which almost always allows “to say the same thing in many different ways”. Such diversity gives way to subtleties that are conveyed laconically, yet have an impact of what would require a much longer text in many other languages.