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Russian is a Slavic language in the Indo-European family spoken by about 170 million people as a first language. Its closest relatives are Ukrainian and Belarusian, the other two national languages in the East Slavic group. In most of the Ukraine and Belarus, the languages are spoken interchangeably, and in central Ukraine traditional bilinguism even resulted in language mixture.

Aside from the Slavic languages, the Russian language was greatly influenced by Greek, Latin, French, German, and English. Modern Russian also has some words adopted from Tatar and some other Turkic languages.

Russian has been spoken around the Volga river since at least the middle ages, and subsequently spread northward and eastward. By the 17th and 18th centuries Russian language had spread across the entirety of what was to become the Soviet Union.

According to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, Russian is classified as a level III language in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers, requiring approximately 780 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency.

Russian is accent free, meaning the accent can be placed on any syllable in the word, making it necessary to learn the accent of each word separately. There are numerous difficulties for the non-native speaker attempting to learn Russian, including five moods, 4 voices, and 3 tenses for the verbs, and six cases for the nouns.