The Russian Language

warning I talk he sucks just kidding it's actually a fantastic website that connects you with international language exchange friends for free and with native teachers who provide customized lessons on skype by your first lesson and get your second lesson free link in description hmm what's the topic of today's video no that's far too general no it's not that either no I already made a video on that one yes that's it hello everyone welcome to the Lang focused Channel and my name is Paul today I'm going to talk about the Russian language why is Russian important well Russian is one of the world's major languages it is one of the six official languages of the United Nations and it is the eighth most widely spoken language in the world with around one hundred and fifty-five million native speakers and around 260 million speakers in total if we include second language speakers it's an official language in Russia of course but also in Belarus Tajikistan Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan it is also an official language in 38 other unrecognized States autonomous territories and regions in Ukraine Moldova and Georgia and also a few localities in Romania and the Russian economic zone in Spitsbergen in Norway it is also widely spoken as a second language and a lingua franca throughout much of Central Asia the Caucasus region and in Eastern Europe even in a lot of places where it is not an official language that's why Russian is important Russian is the most widely spoken language of the Slavic language family have a look at my video on the Slovak language family here to learn more about it in detail but in brief the Slavic languages are a branch of the indo-european language family and the beginning of the Slavic language branch traces back to a language called Protosevich which existed around 500 c-e-o over the next few hundred years proto Slavic split into three varieties west slavic south slavic and east slavic which eventually diverged into branches of the slavic language family containing numerous languages each russian is an east slavic language along with belarusian ukrainian and also rue seen at the time that these three branches developed there was a single slavic literary language that all Slavs could understand that language was Old Church Slavonic rushon is written in the Cyrillic script which was created for the purpose of writing old Church Slavonic until the 14th century the ancestors of modern-day Russians Ukrainians and Belarusians living in a state called Kiev in rust spoke dialects of old east slavic the spoken language existed alongside the literary language of old Church Slavonic a situation of diglossia there is however some evidence that people used to write in the spoken vernacular for some kinds of casual writing birch bark letters from the town of Navarre Road in the 14th century are written in the vernacular language and the concern topics of daily life old Church Slavonic however was the literary and religious language in the 13th century see II Kevin Roose was conquered by the Mongol Empire which brought a lot of foreign Turkic loanwords into the East Slavic dialects especially words related to political and financial matters after the end of Mongol rule in the 14th century the old East Slavic area was split into two separate states the Grand Duchy of Moscow to the east and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to the west in the general area of Ukraine Belarus and Lithuania the oldest Slovak dialects in those two states began to split and develop in different directions in the West the Ruthenian language emerged with heavy polish influence ruthenian dialects would later develop into Ukrainian and Belarusian in the east Russian emerged with much more influence from old Church Slavonic modern Russian today resulted from a kind of tug-of-war between an old Church Slavonic on the one hand and the vernacular spoken dialects on the other hand for example in 1453 C II after the fall of the Byzantine Empire Byzantine and Bulgarian scholars began moving to Moscow and they were upset that old Church Slavonic had become corrupted or rusev eyed and they tried to standardize the language to remove these impurities so a unique Russian language had begun to emerge but scholars pulled the language back towards old Church Slavonic but then during the rule of Peter the Great from 1696 to 1725 the written language was pulled in a different direction away from old Church Slavonic in order to increase literacy he simplified the orthography of the written language eliminating some letters and some diacritics he also made great efforts to modernize and westernized Russia and started to orient Russia towards Europe and French came the common language of the upper classes in Russia as you might guess this resulted in the adoption of some French loanwords into Russian he also oversaw the intentional adoption of specialized modern vocabulary from various european languages like french dutch and german peter the great's reforms were some of the first steps in the development of modern literary russian the basis of standard russian today another influential person in the development of modern literary russian was mikhail lomonosov in 1755 he wrote a grammar of the Russian language which revolutionized the written language by combining old Church Slavonic with the spoken language throughout the grammar he refers to old Church Slavonic as the language of high style and he refers to the spoken language as the language of low style and he advocated a blended middle style for most forms of writing the high style was basically reserved for religious texts and the low style was reserved for the most casual written material in the following decades authors and poets developed a new middle style that would form the core of modern Standard Russian the most influential was the poet Alexander Pushkin who was sometimes referred to as the father of the modern Russian language he fully developed the idea of three different language registers high middle and low making the spoken vernacular a legitimate part of the language he also greatly expanded the vocabulary of literary Russian by directly translating phrases and idioms from other languages he greatly influenced modern literary Russian and as a result modern Standard Russian which formed during this time based on the literary language in the 20th century Russian underwent some small changes mainly in orthography but by far the most important thing to happen to the language was the creation of the Soviet empire Universal schooling and the mass media spread modern Standard Russian and reduced dialectal variation in Russian it also spread the language over a vast geographic area covering all the member states of the USSR today Russian is still widely spoken in all of those areas in his a common lingua franca between different ethnic groups and between the citizens of different countries so what is Russian like orthography Russian is written in the Cyrillic script an alphabet consisting of 33 letters which were mostly developed from Greek letters some are the same as letters of the Latin alphabet but some of the sounds they represent are different like this one phonology there are 21 consonants in Russian but 15 of them can be pronounced in two different ways either hard or soft and you have to judge which sound to make by looking at the letter that comes after the consonant the soft sound is palletized meaning that part of your tongue reaches the roof of your mouth this makes the consonant kind of sound like it's followed by a weiss out here are some examples buck back back back mal mal where we are suck suck vowels there are six basic vowels in Russian but there's a lot of variation in the vowels depending on the surrounding sounds and based on the stress pattern of the word vowels are often reduced when they appear in an unstressed syllable this can make it a challenge to pronounce words correctly based on their spelling grammar Russian is a fusional language meaning that suffixes and prefixes are added to root words to communicate grammatical meaning let's look at nouns first there are six now in cases in Russian meaning that both the singular and the plural form of a noun can take six different forms depending on the grammatical function in the sentence let's look at an example using the word for sister nominative case sister on sister I'd she tired the sister reads genitive case sis three he has now amis history I know the sisters name dative case sister but the history billet the brother gave the sister a ticket accusative case sis true brought visit sister the brother sees the sister instrumental case since Troy he has reboosts histroy I live with the sister prepositional case sister iya nicest area on the sister on a sidenote it's interesting to notice the cognate vocabulary between Russian and English and some other indo-european languages sister his sister brought his brother mediate his ticket and even the word for see he reminds me of the Italian word vedera which means to see so here we see some clear indications of Russian being an indo-european language now back to the noun cases the case endings are different depending on the gender of the noun Russian nouns are grouped according to gender with masculine feminine and neuter nouns you can normally tell the nouns gender based on its ending feminine nouns can take either of these endings neuter nouns can take either of these endings and masculine nouns or the nouns ending in any other letter the one tricky exception is that some nouns end in this letter and these can be either masculine or feminine so you need to memorize the gender of those ones adjectives adjectives and Russian are quite complicated they are inflected to agree with the noun they modify in gender number and in case that means that any particular adjectives can have 24 different forms like this Wow let's look at a couple of examples this is the adjective meaning new in the nominative case no be a de novo Optima bean this is a new car in the genitive case no vova severe no Vova after Mabhida the new cars color so we can see how the ending of the adjectives changes to make it agree with the noun but it's worth noting that the inflectional endings added to the adjectives are different from those added to the noun so you need to memorize a big set of endings for nouns and when to use them but you have to memorize a whole different set of endings for adjectives and when to use those verbs the Russian language has free verb tenses past present and future that sounds straightforward but Russian verbs are also distinguished based on something called aspect there's the perfective aspect which means that an action has been completed once then there's the imperfective aspect which shows that the action is still in progress still ongoing or that it's an action that will be recurring will be repeated many times in Russian verbs there are two different verb stems for the imperfective and the perfective aspect basically like two different words let's look at an example for the verb meaning to write first the perfective not visa and the imperfective piece not either of these stems can be conjugated for past present and future tenses let's look at an example of how aspect changes the meaning of a sentence this sentence uses the verb with the perfective verbs stem and is in the future tense yana be frugal this sentence means I will write a book but when we take the aspect into account the meaning is I will write one specific book an action that will be completed this next sentence uses the imperfecta verb stem and is also in the future tense yeah Buddha besides the meaning of this one is more like I will be writing a book in other words I will be in the process of writing a book at a certain time in the future or if we use the plural form of book then the meaning changes it means I will write books yeah boo boo boo thuds continue and that means I will write numerous books a recurring action so in that case the imperfective aspect indicates a slightly different meaning basic word order the most common word order in Russian is SVO but because of the case system the word order is much more flexible than it is in English in English we normally judge the function of a word depending on where it is in the sentence but in Russian we have the case system the case endings can tell us the function of the word so you can move the words around and we still understand what the subject is what the object is and so on so a basic sentence might be Corsica primal amoun meaning the cat caught the mouse but you could also have mush pamela Corsica or by malloc or commish and some other possible word orders so the basic word order is flexible like that however in some cases the context or the style that you are trying to communicate in will determine the word order articles like most Slavic languages Russian doesn't have any articles it doesn't have words like AA or da if you have any Russian speaking friends who dropped the articles when they're speaking English that's probably the reason so how hard is Russian to learn well according to the American foreign service institute Russian is a category for language the most difficult categories category five and that includes Japanese Mandarin and Arabic but Russian is in category four that means that it's relatively difficult for English speakers but not the most difficult the most challenging things will likely be the inflection of nouns and adjectives as well as the system of verbal aspect some people mistakenly assume that the Cyrillic alphabet is going to be the most challenging part of learning Russian but people actually learn that fairly quickly once they start Russian is a major global language that will be very useful to you if you spend any time in Russia or in any of the former Soviet republics so your efforts will be well rewarded so the question of the day for people who have studied Russian what did you find challenging about Russian and what did you find straightforward about Russian and for native speakers of Russian Russia is a huge country do you notice a lot of variation in the way that Russian is spoken in different parts of the countries are there noticeable accents or dialects these days let us know in the comments down below be sure to follow Leng focus on Twitter on Facebook and on insta and thank you to all my patreon supporters you guys continue to be great and I appreciate you thank you for watching and have a nice day you

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Views: 2,555,425

Rating: 4.8848143 out of 5

Keywords: language study, polyglot, foreign language, travel, phrases, linguist, linguistics, phonology, pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, verb tense, What language is spoken in Russia?, Where is Russian spoken?, Slavic languages, Russian language examples, Russian history, Soviet Union, East Slavic languages, Russian language in Central Asia

Id: Y4cXIyyc-L0

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 25 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/inthebushes321]

"The best Russian online course is on steam, name is csgo and is -50% atm"

As someone who has played CS:GO and is studying Russian, I found this comment to be surprisingly accurate.

[u/zakin9]

I am a native Russian speaker. If you want to speak for me - write to PM

[u/SputTop]

I just started learning Russian and got really scared when he started with the grammar

[u/rabbit-samurai]

guy's a pro. Happened to watch his video about Slavic languages - as a native Slavic language speaker can confirm his info is 99% accurate.

[u/johnfrance]

Is this new tho?

[u/[deleted]]

Why do you think, the so called "Mongolian rule" brought Turkic, not Mongolian loan words to Russian? Because it wasn't actually Mongolian rule, these were Tatar people who actually conquered Russia.