Russian language facts, numbers, and curiosities

Mila is eleven, and her week was taken up by a poster on the Russian language, so the questions she usually saves for баба on a Sunday call were written down and asked in a row, among them how many people speak it, who made it, and whether one root really sits at the front of the word for friend and the word for other. The answers are gathered here, with the firm numbers kept apart from the ones the sources argue over.

How many people speak Russian, and in how many countries

The number that is most often given for those by whom Russian is spoken to some degree is set above 250 million, within which a figure of around 150 million is made up of those by whom it is held as a first language, though the total is one that shifts from source to source. By either measure it is to be placed among the eight or nine most spoken of the world’s languages, it is held to be the most spoken first language of Europe, and it is counted among the six official languages of the United Nations. It is official or co official in about four countries, Russia together with Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, and is an everyday second language across much of the former Soviet Union. Nearer to Mila, close to a million people speak Russian at home in the United States and something over half a million in Canada, which is why a poster of this kind can sit in a Portland classroom and still be about the language of the house.

The countries where Russian is spoken as a second language

Two of Mila’s questions, whether Mongolians speak Russian and whether Armenians do, share the same answer, since in both the language came with the Soviet years and stayed on as a second language rather than a first. In Mongolia, tied closely to the Soviet Union for most of the twentieth century and writing its own language in Cyrillic to this day, Russian was long the first foreign language learned, and it is still spoken by much of the older generation, though the young now lean to English. In Armenia the official language is Armenian, but Russian is taught in the schools, met in the media, and used in trade with Russia, so a great many Armenians use it as a second language. The same is to be observed across much of the region, from Kazakhstan in the east to Moldova in the west, in which it is Russian that is held in common by neighbors by each of whom a tongue of their own is also kept.

Is the Russian language gendered

Russian is a gendered language to a degree by which a child raised in English is taken aback, since each noun is assigned to one of three classes, the masculine, the feminine, or the neuter, and whatever stands around the noun is obliged to agree with it. That a table is feminine and a window neuter is a thing for which no reason can be given, the class being settled by the form of the word, so that the adjective before the noun and, in the past tense, the verb after it are made to take an ending by which the gender is matched. For Mila it was the hardest fact to fit on a poster, since there is no short rule, only the truth that the gender lives in the word and is learned with it.

Who created the Russian language

Who made the Russian language is the kind of question whose answer a poster does not want, since no one made it. Out of the older East Slavic speech from which Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian are each descended the language grew across many centuries, and although the alphabet may be traced to Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century and the modern literary language to Pushkin, upon whose birthday, the sixth of June, the United Nations now keeps its Russian Language Day, an author of the language itself there was none.

The words that are built from друг

One of Mila’s questions had no exact answer, how many Russian words begin with друг, the word for friend. The root is among the busiest in the language, giving друзья, the plural, дружба, friendship, дружить, to be friends, and подруга, a female friend, among many more that a dictionary sets out by the dozen. The curiosity she put at the center of her poster is that the same root sits inside другой, the word for other, so that in the deep history of the language the friend and the other one are the one idea, the person who stands beside you, and a child who learns друг has half learned другой without knowing it.

What people mean by Russian math

The last of Mila’s facts was not about the language at all, since a search for Russian math leads not to Russian words but to a way of teaching arithmetic. For most it means the Russian School of Mathematics, an after school program begun in 1997 near Boston by two Soviet émigrés and now spread across the United States and Canada, and in its wider sense the Soviet method that leads a child to the reason under an answer before the answer itself.

Where a child keeps a language as more than facts

A poster of facts is a fine thing, but a child holds a language only by using it with other people, not by reading about it. At our school the groups are kept small, they meet a couple of times a week, and the words behind the facts, the genders learned with the noun and roots like друг that open onto whole families of words, are met in use rather than in a list. The first two lessons are free and come one after the other. A child is met first by a methodologist, who finds the level at which the child stands, and then takes a full group lesson with a teacher, so that the language on Mila’s poster becomes the language in Mila’s mouth.