History of The Russian Language

Before 1991, Russian was the prefered language for all the nations of the republics of the URSS.Russian is also one of thr official languages of the United Nations.The russian language performs all these complicated duties with honor, for it has one of the richest vocabularies and is one of the most flexible and developed languages in the world.

•     Russian belonds to the eastern branch of the Slavic linguistic family. In about the firs century(before Christ ), the Slavic languagesbecame insolated from the other Indo-European languages.In the sixth and seventh centuries, the Slavic languages diversified and the Eastern Slavicor old Russian language became onre of three branches of the Slavic language.Today,languages of the southern branch spoken in former Yugoslavia, Macedonia, and Bulgaria, with the western branch spoken in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.

•         From the ninth to 12th centuries, Russian was spoken in Kievan Rus, and later (in the 14th to 16th centuries) it became the official language not only in the Moscow state, but also in the Lithuanian and Moldavian princedoms.

But the feudal division and two centuries of Tatar-Mongol domination resulted not only in the disintegration of the state, but also of the language.

• From the 14th to 16th centuries, three fraternal languages developed –Uktainian, Belorussian, and Great Russian(or simple Russian).During the same epoch the Moscow dialect began to play a leading role among the numerous other idioms and dialects spoken at the time.During Tsar Peter’s epoch, the Russian language borrowed many words from wertern Europe.The poet Mikhail Lomonosov(1711-1765) wrote the firs scientific grammar of the Russian language, in which words were classified according to ;styles’’-high, medium, and low. Major reforms to the language were carried out at the beginning of the 19th century by the father of Russian literature-poet Alexander Pushkin.He is the founder of modern Russian literary language and its phonetic, grammatical and lexical standards.