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The Russian Language
History
In the 6th century AD, when Slave people migrated towards the Balkans, they set up the basis for the development of the Russsian language. At the beginning, there were three language groups, quite similar between them and which shared a common writing system called Old Church Slavonic. The Western branch of the Slavonic language gave rise to Russian, but it was a gradual process, as the language continued its evolution until 1918, when it was carried out a spelling reform.In the 20th century, thanks to the successes of the Soviets in politics and technology, the Russsian language acquired more and more prestige. But the importance of Russian was about to grow even more in the following years: when URSS was divided in 1991, Russia resulted the biggest Republic which had originated from the break. Due to the importance of Russia, its language became official in every area of the former URSS and locally it was united to local languages. Nowadays, 250 million people speak Russian all around the world and of these, 180 million live in the territory of the former URSS.
Dialects
Russia is a vast nation, and due to its geographical extension many dialects of Russian have developed with time. Moscow is considered the borderline which divides the "Northern" from the "Southern" dialects, which differ one with the other mainly in pronunciation. Indeed, the unstressed /o/ is markedly pronounced only in the Northern variation, a phenomenon which is known as "okayne".There are many more variations and sub-dialects which have different intonation, vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation if compared to Standard Russian. Some of these forms use archaic vocabulary which nowadays has fallen in disuse.
Grammar
Russian is a fascinating language but when studying it, more than one problem can arise. The starting point is understand Cyrillic, the Russian alphabet, which has different characters with respect to the Western writing system. Cyrillic has 33 letters plus two letters without sound-the hard and the soft sign. It's easy to see that only after at least a month of hard work, you might be able to start reading (which is different from reading fluently!) But keep calm! This was only an introduction, go on reading to find out the following surprises that Russian deserves to you. There are six different cases for the declination of nouns, articles don't exist and in normal sentences you won't find the verb "to be". So, if you want to say that "Mark is a boy", you should say the equivalent of "Mark boy". If all this seems enough complicated, wait to know about the verb "to go", which can be expressed through six different forms depending on which way you are performing the action. You have a different verb depending on if you go in a single direction (uni-directional action), if you go and come back (multi-directional action), if you walk, use the bus or the train...There is a verb for any mean of transport, a good exercise for your memory! If you patience one or two more months, you surely will be able to understand the difference between going to work by bus or by train..you can be happy with your achievement, can't you?