Russian is the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages and belongs to the Indo European family of languages.

The Russian language originated around 500 AD, when Slav tribes from Old Poland migrated westwards to the river Elbe and southwards to the Balkans.

By the 10 th century, three distinct different Slavic language groups had evolved. These were the Western, Southern and Eastern Slavic groups.  The Eastern Slavic language group features three main languages, namely, Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian. The Southern group contains Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian, and the Western group is made up of languages such as Polish, Slovakian and Czech.

Old Church Slavic was the first literary Slavic language and the common written language of the Slavic languages. It originated in the 9 th century, when two missionaries - Constantine (who on his deathbed took the monastic name Cyril) and Methodius - wrote

down the scriptures in Old Church Slavic to preach Christianity to the people of Moravia. In the process, they developed and codified the Old Church Slavic from the Southern Slavic dialect of Solun, as well as invented and introduced the Cyrillic alphabet (as it is now known), which forms the basis of the modern Russian alphabet.

Between the 14 th and 17 th century, there were two languages simultaneously used in Russia - the spoken Russian language used by ordinary people and Old Church Slavic (which was also the liturgical language of the Russian Orthodox Church). The Old Church Slavic continued as the main written form till the middle of the18 th century, when it was revamped to better align the language with the spoken norm of the educated. The Middle Style, which combined features of both East Slavic and Church Slavic, is the version that came to form the basis of the modern standard language.

The standard language is based on the Moscow dialect.

The dialects of the Russian language are generally divided into two primary regional groupings, namely, "Northern" and "Southern," with Moscow lying on the zone of transition between the two. Some linguists choose to divide the dialects into three regional groupings, with Moscow lying in the “Central” region.

There are at least two dozen dialects in use today, with many others discarded in favour of the standard language. Amongst the different dialects, distinct features of pronunciation exist. The intonation, grammar and vocabulary also present with non-standard variations.

The northern dialects typically pronounce unstressed /o/ clearly (the phenomenon called okanye); the southern palatalize the final /t/ and aspirate the /g/ into /h/.

Russian is written using a modern version of the Cyrillic alphabet, consisting of 33 letters. The alphabet is based on the Greek alphabet but it additionally features about a dozen letters invented to represent Slavic sounds not found in Greek . Each of the additional letters borrows some of its form from the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

The Russian language affords a manner of personal address that acquaints you with the person’s paternal lineage. During the first introduction, the person's first name is combined with a modified form of his or her father's first name. 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 named Natasha, 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.

Mastering the pronunciation of Russian words is relatively difficult because the accent is ‘free’. This means that the stress can be placed on any syllable – with no set rules. Thus, the accent for each word has to be learned individually, through actual acquaintance with the spoken word.

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