Russian, Russky

	Russian is one of the Eastern Slavonic languages, and closely related to Belarusian and Ukrainian.
	288,000,000 speakers
	Russian is spoken in the 21 republics of the Russian Federation, as well as Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, and Bulgaria. It is one of the official languages of the United Nations.
	Russian is written in the Cyrillic script. Various letters have been used and later discarded. Today the Russian alphabet has 33 letters.
	Written Russian grew out of the Slavonic writings of the Church, and the earliest existing Russian text is an 11th century translation of the Gospels.
	The Cyrillic alphabet, created in the 9th century by St Cyril, originally contained 43 letters - 24 of them based on the Greek alphabet. It's been whittled down by the various nations that use it, including the Russians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Belarusians and Ukrainians, though each have held on to the characters that are useful to them.
	BBC World Service in Russian.

Key Phrases Yes. No. Welcome! Pleased to meet you. Hello. Goodbye. Thank you.
	My name is ... Do you speak English? I'm sorry, I don't speak Russian. I need help. Where is the toilet, please?

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