Select languages...
Russian linguistic data
Select languages above to compare their features side by side
Common questions about Russian
What linguistic data does this Russian page show?
Word order, tone, gender count, case marking, adposition direction, syllable structure, consonant inventory traits (palatalization), vowel system, morphological alignment, script, register stratification, speaker count, and geographic area. Each row is one feature with Russian's value visible; you can add other languages to read the same feature side by side.
Where do the Russian data points come from?
Typological features are merged from URIEL+ (Mortensen et al.) and a curated set authored against descriptive grammars. Speaker counts come from Ethnologue and Glottolog. Geographic area is computed from the Asher 2007 world language atlas. Similarity scores combine genetic distance, typological overlap, and lexical-borrowing data.
How does Russian aspect work?
Almost every verb has two lexical entries: an imperfective and a perfective. Imperfectives describe ongoing, repeated, or unbounded action (читать chitat' 'to read'); perfectives describe completed, single, bounded events (прочитать prochitat' 'to read through, to finish reading'). The two aren't tense partners — Russian only has past, present, and future, but tense interacts with aspect to give six combinations.
What does Russian palatalization actually mean?
Most Russian consonants come in 'hard' (non-palatalized) and 'soft' (palatalized) versions, and the contrast is phonemic — мать (mat') 'mother' vs мат (mat) 'foul language' differ only in the soft vs hard /t/. Palatalization is signaled in writing by the following vowel letter (ы/и, а/я, о/ё, у/ю) or the soft sign ь.
Why does Russian have a high similarity score with Ukrainian or Belarusian?
All three are East Slavic, share most morphology (six cases, three genders, aspect pairs), the Cyrillic script, and a chunk of cognate vocabulary. Russian and Ukrainian have ~62% lexical overlap, Belarusian sits closer to Russian. Mutual intelligibility on text outranks spoken intelligibility. The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions contributed most.
Sources for Russian
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Wade, Terence (2011). A Comprehensive Russian Grammar, 3rd ed. Wiley-Blackwell.
- Timberlake, Alan (2004). A Reference Grammar of Russian. Cambridge University Press.
- Comrie, Bernard; Stone, Gerald & Polinsky, Maria (1996). The Russian Language in the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. Oxford University Press.
- Sussex, Roland & Cubberley, Paul (2006). The Slavic Languages. Cambridge University Press.