The Russian Language

Today, Russian is spoken mainly in the Russian Federation, along with the Baltic states of Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, in addition to some of the former states of the Soviet Union. It is classed as one of the Indo-European languages and is one of only three surviving from the East Slavic languages.

Russian is the most widely used of the Slavic languages, the most commonly spoken language in Europe and the eighth most spoken native language in the world, with 144 million speakers. In a survey carried out in the spring of 2013 it was found that Russian is now used on 5.9% of all websites, making it the Internet’s second most popular language after English (54.7%) and slightly ahead of German.