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The Russian Language
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In accordance with Article 68 of the Russian Constitution, the Russian language is a state language in Russia's territory. It is taught as first language in educational institutions, official documents are published in Russian, and Russian is used in the country's legislative, executive and judicial institutions. However, the fact that Russian is a state language throughout the Russian Federation does not mean that subjects of the Federation cannot designate ethnic languages as a state language in their territory.
Russian is one of the world's commonest languages. In 1990 there were more than 250 million Russian-speaking people in the world. Russian is the mother tongue of more than 100 million people.
Russian is the working language of the executive bodies of the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Russia-Belarus Union state. It has the status of a working language at the World Customs Organization and is used in the harmonized system of commodity description and encoding. Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.
Russian belongs to the Eastern group of Slavonic languages of the Indo-European family of languages. The written language is based on the Russian alphabet. As distinct from Romanic and Germanic languages, the article and perfect verbal forms are absent from the Russian language. Its case system is much more developed, and the Russian sentence has a looser word order. With a reform of the Russian language in the offing, a draft bill On the Russian Language and a style sheet and orthographic rules are being studied by research institutions and the Russian Language Council under the government.
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