Russian is an East Slavic language of the wider Indo-European family. It is a descendant of the language used in Kievan Rus', a loose conglomerate of East Slavictribes from the late 9th to the mid 13th centuries. From the point

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Feudal divisions and conflicts, and other obstacles to the exchange of goods and ideas that ancient Russian principalities before and especially during Mongol rule, strengthened dialectal differences and for a while prevented the emergence of the standardized national

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In 2010, there were 259.8 million speakers of Russian in the world: in Russia – 137.5 million, in the CISand Baltic countries – 93.7 million, in Eastern

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Russian is one of the official languages (or has similar status and interpretation must be provided into Russian) of the following:
• United Nations

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There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian, and a moderate degree of it across all modern Slavic

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• Balachka, a dialect spoken in Krasnodar region, Don, Kuban, and Terek, brought by relocated Cossacksin 1793 and is based on the southwest

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Russian is a rather homogeneous language, in dialectal variation, due to the early political centralization under Moscow's rule,

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