The Influence of the Russian Language on Russian Culture

The Russian language belongs to the Indo-European family, along with other east Slavonic languages Belarusian and Ukrainian. The Russian language, fairly young, came from a common predecessor: Common Slavonic, which was divided as the Slavic people immigrated in around the 5th century AD. Brothers St. Cyril and St. Methodius, in 863 AD were sent to Moravia (currently the Czech Republic) to translate the Gospel into Slavic. This script was later known as the Glagolitic script. The old Cyrillic alphabet had 44 letters, including Greek numerals was adopted by the eastern Slavs; it became the script used by Russians. Peter the Great reformed the alphabet in 1708-1710, and it was reformed again in 1918, eliminating redundant letters to 33 letters (Kornev, Rahklin and Grigorenko 43). The Russian language influences the culture of the many Russian people, including the 120,000,000 Russian speakers living outside of Russia and the Russian people who still live in the territory covering 1/9 of the earth’s land mass (Kornev, Rahklin and Grigorenko 42). The Russian language is unique in its use of the Cyrillic script, which has many different aspects, making it harder for young people to learn it. There are hard and soft letters that can entirely change the meaning of a word, jotated vowels, and regular vowels. Syllables in the Russian language are hard to master, unless a child is native; he/she will possess a rhyme segmentation to help the child decipher the segmented words (Kornev, Rahklin and Grigorenko 43).

Culture can simply be defined as R. Brislin put it: “Culture relates those aspects of society in which all of its members participate and that they all posses it and pass it down to the next generation” (Leontiev 51). The Russian...

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