The
first written records of Old Russian language appeared in the 10th century.
After the adoption of Christianity in 988, Old Church Slavonic was established
for the liturgical and literary purposes. It made a great influence on the
development of the Russian language, especially written one.
In the 17th century Russian got a lot of borrowings from the other European
languages because policies of Peter the Great. At the beginning of the 19
century most of nobility spoke French and it added a lot of vocabulary to
Russian.
In the 14th century Old Russian broke into Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian.
Russian is spoken by about 146 million people on the territory of our country,
it is also one of the official languages in Belarus , Kazakhstan , Crimea
and some others.
Before the break of the Soviet Union Russian was the official language in
all republics, now Russian speaking minorities there continue to use it
at home.
Russian language is very beautiful and considered to be one of the most difficult languages in the world after Chinese and Japanese.
The language is one of the official languages of United Nations and UNESCO. Russian belongs to the Indo-European language family, East Slavic group. It uses Cyrillic alphabet.
