Wikipedia:Today's featured article/August 28, 2004

Cyrillic alphabet as given by Meletius Smotrisky in 1619

Russian is the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages. It belongs to the group of Indo-European languages, and is therefore related to Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, as well as the modern Germanic, Romance, and Celtic languages, including English, French, and Gaelic. Written examples are extant from the tenth century A.D. onwards. While it preserves much of its ancient synthetic-inflexional structure and a Common Slavonic word base, modern Russian shares a large stock of the international vocabulary for politics, science, and technology. A language of political importance in the twentieth century, Russian is one of the official languages of the United Nations. (more...)

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