01Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, and is the native language of 142 million citizens of the Russian Federation, the world's largest country. It is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken Slavic language.
02Besides Russian, there are 160 ethnic groups speaking about 100 different languages in Russia.
03The Russian alphabet, known as Cyrillic, goes back to the ninth century. Its most ancient version was devised by two Greek missionaries – brothers Cyril and Methodius, both outstanding scholars and linguists. The alphabet assumed its modern shape in the 17th century under Peter the Great, while the written Russian of today was introduced by the Soviet government in 1918. The reform didn’t just simplify the writing but symbolised a break with the Tsarist past.
04Russia’s Cyrillic alphabet contains 33 letters, 2 of which have no sound on their own, but they carry grammatical meaning and are still considered letters. The 'Hard Sign ('Ъ ъ) indicates a slight pause between syllables, the 'Soft Sign' (Ь ь) makes the previous letter 'soft'.
05Over a quarter of the world's scientific literature is published in Russian. Russian is also applied as a means of coding and storage of universal knowledge—60–70% of all world information is published in the English and Russian languages.
06Unearthed in 2000, the Novgorod Codex is considered to be the most ancient Russian book which dates back to the beginning of the 11th century. The wooden book with four wax pages was used for a few decades to record psalms and other religious texts.
07Stress in the Russian language is free and moving, that is it can fall on any syllable of the word and on different syllables within the paradigm of the same word. Stress has an impact on the meaning e.g. Я плачу, ja plachU, means I'm paying while я плáчу, ja plAchu, means I'm crying. Similarly, to change a sentence into a general question one only needs to change intonation, i.e. "Ты дома." You are at home vs "Ты дома?" Are you at home?
08"Bistro" a small restaurant or café could have originated from the Russian "bystro", meaning "quick" or "rapidly". The word may have been loaned when the Russian Cossacks occupied Paris in 1814, at the end of the Napoleon war. Russian Cossacks, who wanted to be served quickly, would shout "bystro". The French, supposedly, picked it up and adopted it as a name for their small restaurants with robust earthy dishes, that later on conquered the world. Interestingly enough, after donating a word to the French language, the Russians re-loaned it back with the appearance of famous restaurants on their territory in the 20th century. The only thing that has changed is the stress. Russian "´bystro" is stressed at the first syllable, whereas French "bis´tro" is stressed at the last.
09Russian names generally consist of three parts: the first or given name, the patronymic, and the last or family name. The patronymic is created by taking the given name of a person's father and adding a suffix to it. This suffix means "son of" or "daughter of." If a man’s first name is Ivan and his father’s first name is also Ivan, you would call him Ivan Ivanovich (Ivan, son of Ivan), and if Ivan had a sister, she would be called Natasha Ivanovna, (Natasha, daughter of Ivan). The -ovich and -ovna suffixes are always appended to the father’s first name and not to the mother’s.
10The Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (since 1944) was established as a research center for Russian language and Russian literature, following the example of the Académie française. In 1841 it was merged into the Imperial Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
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