Russian

Russian

The Russian language, spoken by over 200 million people worldwide, belongs to the Eastern group of the Slavic branch of Indo-European languages along with Ukrainian and Belarusian.

Russian is the official language of communication for the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and has the status of an official UN language.

The script is a modernized version of the Cyrillic alphabet which, having undergone sweeping reforms in 1918, now consists of 33 characters. Several letters of the original alphabet are no longer in use. 

Russian nouns show three genders and six cases.  There is a high correspondence between how the language is written and how it is pronounced, though there are some inconsistencies. The punctuation system used originates from Byzantine Greek and was modified in 17th and 18th centuries to more closely resemble the German and French systems.