Research Guides: Russia : Language

Basic Russian

Greetings and Goodbyes - Приветствия и прощания
Learn how to greet people and say goodbye in Russian
Introducing Yourself - Знакомство
Introducing yourself in Russian
50 COMMON PHRASES IN RUSSIAN: BASIC RUSSIAN

Russian
Russian (ISO 639-3 rus) is an Indo-European East Slavic language spoken by about 162 million people as their first language and about another 110 million as their second language (Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2013), mainly in the Russian Federation (where it is the native language of about 80% of the population, see Berger 1998, Federal’naja služba gosudarstvennoj statistiki (Federal State Statistics Service) 2012: 228–232) and in the other former republics of the USSR (among which it is co-official in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan).
How to Learn the Russian Alphabet
In depth explanation of Russian letters and their pronunciation
Russian Alphabet
Examples of how to pronounce and write Russian letters

Dictionary of abbreviations
In Russian, some names and phrases turned out to be too long for everyday use. Artists who painted signs for various institutions were especially dissatisfied: they could not fit the inscription "Research Institute of Electronic Commerce and Banner Systems" on a standard plate. Then all the long names were taken and shrunk to the size of abbreviations. NIIEKiBS fit perfectly into the plate, but another problem arose: how to unzip NIIEKiBS back to the size of the "Research Institute of E-Commerce and Banner Systems" so that everything is immediately clear to everyone? For these purposes, a specialized decryption server SOKR.RU was created.
Russian stress marking tool
RussianGram.com helps you read and understand Russian by automatically adding stress marks and dots above the letter Ё.
Wiktionary. Free dictionary
Wiktionary is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of terms (including words, phrases, proverbs, linguistic reconstructions, etc.) in all natural languages and in a number of artificial languages.

Dictionary of Russian Personal Names by Morton Benson
Publication Date: 2016-11-11
This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Turn Russian Numbers into Numbers
This web app turns normal numbers like 1,2, 4, 500 into Russian word numbers. You can also turn Russian word numbers into digit numbers for example, Двести Тридцать Два would become 232.
Enter Russian words and find what gender it is
This resource can help you determine the grammatical gender of Russian words. Russian nouns are divided into masculine, feminine and neuter forms. As a very general rule, the grammatical gender of animate objects is conditional on various factors (e.g. the root word), although there are animate neutral nouns such as "animal" (животное) and "child" (ребенок).
Russian Worksheet Creator
This generator can be used to create PDF writing sheets for Cyrillic. These worksheets will help Russian learners practice writing Cyrillic. Enter the Russian text that you want and then you can get custom PDF Russian worksheets to practice your Russian. There are many different options for customization, including the display form and the fonts. You can also decide how large the word searches will be. When a worksheet is generated, the app will also generate a second page which is the "answer key" that shows where all the words can be found. You will be able to print this answer key and however many worksheets you'd like.

The following video talks about the history and development of the Russian language. (Language: Russian + English subtitles)

The Power of Language and Rhetoric in Russian Political History by Richard S. Wortman
Publication Date: 2017-11-30
This book examines the rhetorical force of certain key words in the discourses of Russian state, political thought, and literature. It shows how terms for cultured conduct (kul'turnost'), political affection (love, liubov', joy-radost' etc.), personhood (lichnost'), truth (pravda) and geographical integrity (tsel'nost') assumed almost sacral meaning. It considers how these terms took on a life of their own, imposing the designs of the Russian state and defining the hopes of educated society in the process. By exploring the usage of these words in a wide range of texts, Richard Wortman provides glimpses into the ideas and feelings of leading figures and thinkers in Russian history, from Peter the Great to Alexander Herzen and Nicholas Berdiaev, as well as writers like Mikhail Lermontov, Ivan Turgenev, and Fedor Dostoevsky, giving a sense of the intellectual and emotional universe they inhabited. The Power of Language and Rhetoric in Russian Political History provides both students and scholars with a specific focus through which to approach Russian culture and history. This book is essential reading for students of Russian government, thought, literature and political action.