Russian Status After the Fall of the Soviet Union
The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 did not reduce the importance of the Russian language. While it changed its distribution, the Russian language remains widespread and tremendously important.
Russia has become increasingly important because of its oil and gas production and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Significant numbers of speakers are also found in Israel,Canada and the United States.
The Russian language is a member of the East Slavic subfamily of Indo-European languages. It emerged from earlier linguistic form called Church Slavonic.
Approximately 170 million people speak Russian as a first language and apart from the Russia, the Russian language is also spoken throughout the former republics of the Soviet Union including the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Latvia, Kyrgystan, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Lithuania, and Armenia.
Even after the fall of the Soviet Union and the resurgence of various indigenous languages in the various former Republics, Russian remains an official language in various republics.
For example, the Russian language is an official language of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and the de facto official language of the regions of Transnistria, South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Russian is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations.
