Russian language

Russian
русский язык (russkiy yazik)
Pronunciation	[ˈruskʲɪj jɪˈzɨk]
Native to	Russia, other post-Soviet states
Native speakers	150 million (2010) 260 million (L1 plus L2 speakers) (2012)
Language family	Indo-European Balto-Slavic Slavic East Slavic Russian
Early forms	Old East Slavic Russian
Writing system	Cyrillic (Russian alphabet) Russian Braille
Official status
Official language in	38+ territories  Russia (state)  Belarus (state)  Mongolia (Official)  Kazakhstan (official)  Kyrgyzstan (official)  Tajikistan (inter-ethnic communication)  Uzbekistan (inter-ethnic communication)  Moldova: Gagauzia (official)  Norway: Svalbard (equal status with Norwegian) Partially recognized states:  Abkhazia(official)  South Ossetia(state) Unrecognised states:  Transnistria (official)  Donetsk People's Republic  Luhansk People's Republic Organizations:  United Nations IAEA ICAO UNESCO WHO CIS EAEC CSTO GUAM SCO OSCE ATS ISO
Recognised minority language in	List  Romania (regional and minority) A number of municipalities in Tulcea County and Constanța County  Ukraine (regional and minority) Autonomous Republic of Crimea Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Donetsk Oblast Kharkiv Oblast Kherson Oblast Luhansk Oblast Mykolaiv Oblast Odessa Oblast Zaporizhia Oblast  Norway Sør-Varanger  Armenia  Poland  Czech Republic  Slovakia  Moldova  Uzbekistan  United States New York (election documents)
Regulated by	Russian Language Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences
Language codes
ISO 639-1	ru
ISO 639-2
ISO 639-3
Glottolog	russ1263
Linguasphere	53-AAA-ea < 53-AAA-e (varieties: 53-AAA-eaa to 53-AAA-eat)
States where Russian is an official language (dark blue) or a de facto working language (teal)
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

Russian (ру́сский язы́к, russkiy yazik, pronounced [ˈruskʲɪj jɪˈzɨk]) is an East Slavic language and an official language in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and many minor or unrecognised territories. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine and Latvia, and to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics of the Soviet Union and former participants of the Eastern Bloc. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of the four living members of the East Slavic languages. Written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century and beyond.

It is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages. It is also the largest native language in Europe, with 144 million native speakers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers and the seventh by total number of speakers. The language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.