Russian Language

"At that point I realized that I had been thinking in Russian. It’s a wonderful language for paranoid thoughts."

- Robert A. Heinlein, The Number of the Beast

The official language of the Russian Federation and, in the past, the Soviet Union. And in fiction, often the language of the Commie Land. To an English speaker, its grammar is more alien than German, but, since it's still part of the Indo-European family, less alien than Japanese.

For some useful Russian expressions, see Russian Proverbs and Expressions. See also Russian Literature.

The Alphabet

The modern Russian alphabet, an evolution of the original Cyrillic, consists of 33 letters. Four letters were obsoleted by the spelling reform of 1918, and are not used today except in ironic Internet usage and writings trying to evoke an "archaic" style, often without regard for their actual usage rules (similar to Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe).

The modern "Latinized", simplified shapes of the letters were introduced by Peter I in the early 18th century, as part of the "civil script" that replaced the old "Church Slavonic script". To foreigners, this is not without its drawbacks, as Cyrillic letters often denote completely different sounds than the Latin letters they resemble—for example, P and C (which resemble the Latin P and C) denote the "R" and "S" sounds respectively, and И and Я, the infamous "backwards N" and "backwards R", are actually "ee" and "Ya". Hence Россия "Russia" = "ross-ee-ya", and the O actually sounds like A due to its unstressed position. See The Backwards R for more on this.

The Church Slavonic script is still sometimes used today, not only by the church, but also for evoking archaic style and/or all-Russianness, similar to Gothic Fraktur in Germany or Hentaigana in Japan.

Also, Ю is not the Enterprise. It's "yu". No, not you, but sounds exactly like "you".

The Forms of Language

Basically, there are two forms of Russian. The first is the aptly-named "klassicheskiy literaturniy yazik" (classical literary language), which is the language the famous nineteenth-century Russian novels were written in, and still used today with few or no changes other than the 1918 spelling reform as the formal, most proper form of the language (the closest thing Russian has to Keigo). Speaking this way is a sign of an educated, sophisticated and polite person. The second is your garden-variety Russian spoken by most people. There are a lot of subtle differences between these forms of Russian beyond simply different words, such as differently placed stress in words (stress being the particular horror of anyone studying Russian). The most well known shibboleth is the word "zvonit", which is the third person singular of the verb to ring: in classical Russian it is "zvo-NEET", in common Russian it is "ZVO-nit". Another shibboleth is the word "kofe" (coffee): it is masculine in classical Russian but neuter in common language.


 * As of 1 September 2009, "кофе" (coffee) was changed from masculine to neuter. It was masculine as the word used to be "кофей", which IS masculine.
 * This change, along with many others, has provoked a predictable reaction from those of us who did pay attention in Writing class.
 * Except that both forms were officially recognized as correct since The Seventies, it's just that no one actually noticed.

The classical Russian somewhat fell into disuse in Soviet times, and the new formal language of choice for Soviet bureaucrats was a Newspeak-esque mishmash of common Russian, loanwords and legal gobbledygook. Such manner of speech (the "kantselyarit") is considered particularly obnoxious today, especially by linguists, and it's now the hallmark of Obstructive Bureaucrats and cops. The infamous form of address "grazhdanin" (citizen), used to address perps and prisoners, is part of this style of Russian. Overdone kantselyarit can also sound funny to Russians, and it is sometimes used for comedic value in Russian-language works.

Besides these forms, there is also the pre-Pushkinian Russian, which is basically a particularly obscure kind of Antiquated Linguistics as spoken in Catherinian times and before that. It's not used today. Russians will understand if you speak to them this way, but they will stare at you.

And of course, there is also the mat (Not to be confused with "mother", mat^), a patois consisting mostly of obscenities and words derived from them. Yes, the Russians invented an entire dialect just so they could curse more effectively. If classical Russian is the equivalent to Keigo, then mat would be a separate politeness level even below Joutai (plain speech), a negative politeness level, if you will. Trash-talking Russians manage to convey complex messages through sentences which seem to consist only of various Cluster F Bombs to a foreign ear. Sometimes sounds like a form of Buffy-Speak in which "thing" and other placeholders are replaced with a variety of obscenities. This is a language form of choice for the most uncultured Russians, such as blue collar workers, homeless persons and petty criminals. Note the emphasis on "petty": The Mafiya has its own distinct style of thieves' cant, known as fenya or fenka.
 * The usage of mat in the media is an extreme taboo - it gets bleeped out on TV even after the watershed, and the few movies that do employ obscenities tend to limit them to Precision F Strikes, rather than showing off the more complex mat structures in all their twisted beauty. Also, official Russian dubs of foreign movies tend to get notoriously Bowdlerised because of this, though some unofficial dub writers, such as Dmitry "Goblin" Puchkov, release more authentic translations. Goblin is also famous for making gag dubs that translate perfectly innocent dialogue from films like The Lord of the Rings into a mix of mat and fenya.

On the other hand, the post-Soviet times saw the elevation of former scum of the society to high standing (the New Russians of the jokes, also golddiggers). And it's a very zeitgeist-y identifying mark of The New Russia to see elegantly, expensively dressed people speaking mat.


 * One can wonder about communicating by F-words only. The explanation is simple: Russian grammar. Morphologically, most words in Russian have a four-part structure: one or several prefixes, a base, one or several suffixes and a flexion. Some parts of this structure may be missing or empty, there are some cases that don't fit here, and of course prepositions and other small words do not have this structure, but it's a good general idea to start with. Base conveys a "base meaning", flexion (indirectly) defines word's place in sentence's syntax, and prefixes and suffixes are used to alter the meaning of the base in a very wide range. For example, "выйти" and "войти" ("to walk out" and "to walk in") have different prefixes. There are several ramifications. First, you can stuff a lot of meaning into one word. When one thinks about that, one could think of Orwellian newspeak. This comparison is, of course, not entirely correct: there are a lot of bases. More than that, sometimes bases get strung together: "волкодав" (wolfhound) has a base made up from two bases - "волк" for wolf and "дав", as in "давить" - to stomp. You can even go further: string together "пар" (steam) and "ход" (walk) to get "пароход" (steamship, literally "steam walker"), then add a suffix to get пароходство" (steamshipping company). There's actually no theoretical limit for number of bases within one word, but thinking of a word with three or four bases is a kind of a challenge. Second: you get a very flexible language. Sayings about "great and mighty" are not entirely false, as you can see. Third, compared to English, words tend to be longer both in letters (which makes a major pain in the ass when you're translating comics) and in syllables (which makes a lot of trouble when you're dubbing). So, what does make some word an F-word? Answer is simple: a base. There are several bases (seven or so) which have F-word status. Any word containing one of these bases is automatically an F-word. An example in English might be, "Abso-fucking-lutely," or "Fan-fucking-tastic." Remember that prefixes, suffixes and flexions are still there, so you can still stuff a lot of meaning around the F-base. You can even have two bases in a word, of which only one is an F-base, and your word still counts as an F-word. Bonus points if you can stuff two F-bases in one word, and even more bonus points if all bases in your sentence are F-bases.

Compared to most other major world languages Russian has very little regional variance, somewhat surprisingly for a language covering such a gigantic territory. This may have a lot to do with the fact that, until very recently, Russian was the official language of just one state, unlike English or Spanish. Because of this there is only one standard version of the language and most Russian language teachers believe that there is only one correct way to pronounce or to write a word (and older language teachers from Russia seem to think that all languages work like that, so an English teacher might mark you down if you pronounce some words in the American way). Also, the seventy years of the Soviet Union involved major population transfers, rapid urbanisation, standardisation of education and a highly centralised media, all of which contributed to the dilution of regional differences. A few basic dialect groups can be distinguished, but they are highly mutually intelligible, so there is no equivalent to Okinawan, Swiss German or the Scots dialect/language (although more than a hundred other native languages are spoken in Russia, they are not related to Russian). Interestingly, before the Revolution, the situation was quite different. There were plenty of local dialects (the factors above largely destroyed them, but some older people still speak them), often differing from each other more than Russian from Ukrainian.
 * Southern. Features include pronouncing both unstressed o and a as "ah", as opposed to "uh" in standard Russian (see below) and pronouncing г (g) as something between "g" and "h", similar to the Dutch g. Dialects of most Cossacks are southern. Both Mikhail Gorbachev and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spoke southern Russian.
 * Northern. Pretty much the opposite of southern, with o pronounced as in "or" even when unstressed and g pronounced as a solid g. Its grammar is also quite distinct, with a more complicated tense structure and a rudimentary definite article. The northern dialect is associated most strongly with the city of Vologda, as well as with the Pomors, a coastal population of northern Russia, notable for fishing and overseas trading. Mikhail Lomonosov, Russia's most famous polymath, was a Pomor.
 * Moscow and St. Petersburg. Both are very similar to standard, with Moscow leaning slightly southwards with the o/a pronounciation, as well as having a bit of a drawl. Many small differences in vocabulary - the two cities even have something akin to the English "pavement-sidewalk" split with the word for "curb" being bordyur in Moscow and porebrik in St. Petersburg. Also, for some weird reason the Middle Eastern dish shawarma (a type of doner kebab) is called "shaurmA" in Moscow, but "shavErma" in St. Petersburg.
 * Odessa. This Ukrainian but mostly Russian-speaking city has been a melting pot of Russian, Ukrainian, Ashkenazi, Greek and many other immigrant cultures, producing a unique dialect with a strong Yiddish influence, similarly to New York English. The New York connections do not end there, as the Odessa dialect is strongly associated with organised gangsters and (mostly Jewish) comedians (for example, Yakov Smirnoff happens to be from Odessa). And also, there is a reason why the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Brighton Beach, the most well-known Russophone community in the US, is referred to as "Little Odessa" rather than "Little Moscow".
 * Even though nowadays the status of Ukrainian as a language in its own right is not disputed by anyone except hardline Russian nationalists, 30% of Ukraine's population speak Russian as a first language. These people speak a form of Russian that is slightly influenced by Ukrainian phonetics and vocabulary. In the rural areas of eastern Ukraine there is also a mixed language, known as Surzhyk, which is a result of Soviet marginalisation of the Ukrainian language and its Russification. Nowadays Surzhyk is often used for comical effect in Russian and Ukrainian media, sounding inherently funny to speakers of both standard Ukrainian and standard Russian.
 * The Russian influence on Ukrainian was a double-edged sword. While the central government undeniably pushed Russian as a primary language, it, following the official national policy of the Soviet Union, poured enormous funds and effort into development of Ukrainian (and other national languages) as a secondary, but genuine literary language in its own right, unlike the Tsarist one, that didn't even consider it a language, but a particularly rustic dialect of Russian.
 * Belarus has a similar situation, except its Russophone population is more than 70% of the total, the Russian spoken by urbanites is not influenced by the local language as strongly as in the Ukraine, and its equivalent to Surzhyk, Trasianka, is not as region specific and is spoken pretty much in all rural areas.

The Phonetics

Unlike in English where you have such phonetic disasters as the pronunciations of "cough," "through," "though," "rough," "thought," and "bough," with the "ough" in each being pronounced differently ("off," "oo," "oh," "uff," "ah" and "ow" respectively), the sound that each Russian letter produces is largely consistent, and will remain the same irrespective of which other letters it is placed next to. That is, aside from a few rules and some exceptions, which are also 90% consistent, once you know what sound each Russian letter makes, knowing how to correctly pronounce the words is simply a matter of practice. There may also be some consolation in the fact that in Russian, like in Japanese, loanwords are always spelled phonetically, so you do not have to worry about other languages' spelling conventions. For example, the French loanword mauvais ton is spelled "моветон" ("moveton"), not "мауваис тон".

The sound set itself is probably not all that difficult to master, except for the concept of palatalization, which is alien to English. If you have heard Japanese speech, you know the distinction between na/nu/no and nya/nyu/nyo, but in Russian, palatalization is a feature of consonants (even if it's not written this way) and can occur with any vowel, or even without one. This is what the soft sign letter ь is mostly used for—to indicate that the previous consonant is palatalized, although after ш "sh" and щ "shch" it merely denotes the grammatical gender (as the two letters denote a palatalized and non-palatalized form of the same sound).

Of particular note are the vowels е and ы; the former denotes the soft e sound, pronounced like "ye" as in "yes," and the latter denotes the hard i sound and is not found in English. Furthermore, the soft e is the default in Russian, and the hard e (denoted by э) occurs almost exclusively in loanwords; so a Russian is more likely to transcribe the word "нет" (no) into English as "net" rather than the Hollywood standard "nyet". The ы sound is out of necessity transcribed as the Latin letter y (сыр "cheese" = syr), after standard Polish spelling, Polish being both a Slavic language that has the "hard i" sound, and using Latin script.

The nastiest thing is the stress. In French, stress falls on the last syllable. In Hungarian, it's the first. In Polish, a West Slavic language (Russian is East Slavic), it's the penultimate one. In Russian, there is NO rule where to put it. You simply have to remember it in every single word. To make things harder, vowels sound differently depending on are they stressed or not. For example, the letter "o" sounds like "oh" if stressed but "uh" if not. To make things even harder, the unstressed "a" also sounds like "uh". Russian technically has a stress mark to show where the stress falls in a word, but good luck finding any though, as Russians, being native speakers, already know how to pronounce their own words and don't use them. Typically, you will only see stress marks in dictionaries. Despite all this, stress is not that bad. You can often guess instinctively where the stress falls (Russian tends to favor the penultimate syllable), and if you fail, most of the time the worst that'll happen is you'll sound silly, but still be understood. Perilous words do exist, however. Placing the wrong stress on писать (pee-SAHT), "to write," can make you end up saying писать (PEE-saht): to piss.

The Grammar

Russian loves inflections, and the rules governing them are not always straightforward. Interestingly, many Russians don't see it as a drawback and refuse to see their language as anything other than absolutely perfect—or, as unoriginal people repeat after Ivan Turgenev, "great and mighty" ("velikiy i moguchiy", великий и могучий). This is often used in ironic contexts, such as the short poem ending with the phrase "velik moguchim russkiy yazyka" (велик могучим русский языка), in which every word is inflected incorrectly but the meaning is preserved. However, if translated into English in the most precise manner, rather than meaning "the great and mighty Russian language" the phrase could become something like "the Russian man of the language is great with the mighty one"; the reason why such a mix-up of the word order is possible is explained below.

Suffixies and inflections can change word meaning dramatically and, as noted above, words may have very many forms. Verbs are extreme example. Most verbs (but not all, that is often a headache even for native speacker) has infinitive, up to seven forms for present/past/future each, adjective-like forms with distictive form for every male/female/neutral for every of six types of verb-conjugation of main noun and 'adjective-for-verb' for male/female/neutral, with more then one hundred forms totally for most verbs. So, take care when reading Russian texts. The good thing is that all these forms are built in one of few regular ways and there are very few 'irregular' verbs.

Verbs have three tenses (present, past and future) and fall under two conjugations (almost always determined by the infinitive, with few well-documented exceptions), with variations in conjugation similar to German; in addition, the past tense is inflected for gender. Nouns vary among six cases (the German four, plus instrumental -- "by/with X"—and prepositional) and between singular and plural, and always belong to one out of three genders. As in German, the genders are absolutely non-obvious (for example, the German Insel "island" is feminine, but the Russian остров (ostrov) "island" is masculine), although in many cases you can determine them by just looking at the noun. There are three declensions for nouns, rigidly determined by the gender and word ending in the nominative case, and can help determine the gender despite not mapping exactly to genders (for example, both папа (papa) "dad" and мама (mama) "mom" are first declension). Adjectives are the worst of all, inflecting for case, number and gender—which means memorizing a 6x4 matrix of word endings (six cases, times masculine/feminine/neuter/plural).

As an upside (or downside, depending on whom you ask), the developed system of inflections allows for great varieties in word order—although the most common one is still Subject Verb Object (and sometimes Subject Object Verb), and other orders are usually found in poetry or in colloquial speech (where they can be used to subtly alter the meaning). Verb-subject inversion in questions is typically found only in yes-no questions, and in colloquial speech even that is uncommon—so the only difference between an affirmative statement and a question becomes intonation or, in written Russian, the question mark.

As in Japanese, some parts of a Russian sentence, most notably the subject, can be dropped if it is clear from the context or already mentioned once; however, unlike Japanese, the subject is determined by the verb's inflection and thus the information is not technically lost. Also, rather unusually for an Indo-European language, the copula "to be" is always dropped in the present tense. Thus a Russian doctor would say "Ya vrach" ("I (a) doctor"), not "Ya yest' vrach" ("I am (a) doctor"), unless he wants to make it sound emphatic or archaic (technically the correct copula for the first person would be yesm^, not yest, but since it is practically never used in modern Russian, most people would consider it outdated). Since the Old Church Slavonic language notably retains this copula, "yesm" is associated with the Bible among most Russians.

Russian is notably a gender-specific language, and many Russians take it as the norm and label any criticism of the language's sexism "political correctness propaganda". For adjectives, the masculine gender is considered the "base form". While there are no gender- or age-specific first person pronouns like in Japanese (я "I", like in English, carries no connotations except "this person now speaking"), one cannot say a sentence in the past tense without revealing the subject's gender (a major headache for translators). On official forms, this results in all kinds of clumsy constructs involving parentheses for feminine constructs, like родился(ась) "was born". There are no gender-neutral third-person pronouns, and Russians don't normally bother even with the English-style cop-out "he or she" and just use "he" for people or animals of indefinite gender. Yes, animals too—animals are "he" or "she", not "it", and some species names are grammatically always female (белка "squirrel") or always male (ястреб "hawk") with no way to form the opposite gender. The word человек "human, person" is masculine as well, as are most profession names except for "traditionally female" ones, awkwardly forcing women to use masculine forms of adjectives. Notably, while there do exist ways to make feminine forms of some profession names, their usage is decreasing, and indeed women may find it derogatory and instead use the masculine forms, seen as more gender-neutral. All this led the linguists to separate such words as the fourth, "common" gender.

Quite a problem may be that in Russian has different words for you-singular(ты) and you-plural(вы). Well not THIS, but use of you-plural as polite form. It is quite a problem to take the correct one when translating from English, as you-plural is almost never used within family or between close friends and is usually used in formal situations. It is also a default for talking with a boss or simply an unknown person. The correct linguistic term for such disambiguation is T-V distinction, and the related phenomenon of Royal We is called pluralis majestatis.

You also have to look carefully at commas when reading Russian texts. Commas are used to distinct logic blocks in sentence and their moving may change the meaning of the sentence, even to the direct opposite one.

Addendum: This Russian troper would like to note that the above paragraph is incorrect in the sense that it assumes that the gender of a word is/should be derived from the meaning. Actually, with precious few exceptions, the gender can always be derived from the ending of the word. Words ending with a consonant are typically masculine, words ending with а, я or ь are feminine and words ending with о, е or ё are neutral. For example, "гриб" and "салат" ("mushroom" and "salad") both end in consonants and are masculine, while the words "дочь", "заря" and "лапа" ("daughter", "dawn" and "paw") are feminine. Similarly, "небо", "население" and "старьё" ("sky", "population" and "old stuff") are neutral. This makes the gender structure in the Russian language far more reliable than some better-known examples in other languages that differentiate between genders, like the horrific German, where a woman ("die Frau") ist feminine while a girl ("das Mädchen") is all of sudden neutral. And no, coffee is still masculine in Russian.
 * This Russian-taking high school student would like to laugh at the previous statement...
 * See "The Forms of Russian" above.
 * There is a Russian joke about coffee: if it is good, it's a "he". If it is bad, it's an "it". It as in "shit" (The Russian word for "shit", just like in English, sounds similar to the Russian word for "it", and "shit" is neuter in Russian).
 * Note about the comment about German - Yes, women take the feminine article and men the male. Diminutives are always neutral (feminine is used to denote a plural diminutive) thus Mädchen, the diminutive form of the no-longer-used Magd (the g being dropped), is neutral.
 * Perhaps a better example of what the first Russian troper meant would be how in German the words "woman" (die Frau), "building" (der Bau) and "rope" (das Tau) all have different grammatical genders, despite being so similar (same number of syllables, endings, vowels) and, with the obvious exception of die Frau, having no connection to a specific gender that can be derived from the meaning. The only exceptions from the Russian gender pattern are loanwords, diminutives and terms of endearment (including papa for "dad", as opposed to otets for "father"), and some Biblical masculine names, e.g. Foma (Thomas), Luka (Luke) and Ilya (Elijah).
 * At least two such names (Rimma and Inna, two names of Christian martyrs), have actually become female in Russia.
 * This other Russian-taking high school (soon to be college) student would like to correct the above addendum. Not all words that end with "ь" are feminine. Examples such as "словарь" ("dictionary"), "олень" ("deer"), and "учитель" ("teacher") are all masculine, yet end with "ь". Even so, the gender can still be derived easily from context.

Why Lzherusskie Sound Like They Do

You will often hear Russian characters not using articles in sentences, for example: "large rocket ship blows up hotel with missile". This is because Russian does not have articles at all. "Large rocket ship" is a translation of Bol'shoy Raketny Korabl (BRK), an official Russian designation for a missile-carrying destroyer like the Project 956 Sarych "Sovremennyy" class.

Apart from article misuse, there are other characteristic traits of a Russian accent. Most of them comes from use of Russian pronunciation: 'R' in Russian is always hard and vowels in unstressed positions are usually 'reduced' to very short vowels, Russian does not have 'ng' sound and some English vowels are indistiguishable for Russian ear. There are also no "th" sounds in Russian, a trait it shares with many other European languages, so mispronouncing "th" as "f", "v", "s" or "z" is also a part of Russian accent. Same thing with "w", Russians, like Germans, tend to pronounce it as "v" or sometimes "oo".