Russian and its role in the world

• Russian is the language spoken in Russia and all the other countries that were once constituent republics of the USSR.
• Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of the three members of the East Slavic languages.
• Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages.
• It is also the largest native language in Europe, with 155 million native speakers.
• Russian is the eighth  most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers and the fourth by total number of speakers.
• It is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations.