Russian is the official language of Russia, and an official language of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Autonomous Republic of Crimea (Ukraine), and the unrecognized Moldovan Republic of Transnistria. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

Significant Russian-speaking groups also exist in Western Europe. These have been fed by several waves of immigrants since the beginning of the twentieth century. Russian is also spoken in Israel by at least 750,000 ethnic Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union (1999 census). Sizeable Russian-speaking communities also exist in North America, especially in large urban centers of the U.S. and Canada such as New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, Miami, and Chicago.

Russian is written using a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet, consisting of 33 letters. It is a Slavic language in the Indo-European family. From the point of view of the spoken language, its closest relatives are Belarusian and Ukrainian, the other two national languages in the East Slavic group. In many places in Ukraine and Belarus, these languages are spoken interchangeably.

Russian speakers online<
How robust is the number of Russian speakers who are using the Internet? According to Internet World Stats’ listing of users by language, Russia has more than 20% of its population logging on; or over 29 million people. Interested in the countries making up the top 10 in terms of Internet usage? Visit Languages of the World
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