Current Picture of Russian Visitors in the European Scene
General Facts about Russia
Relevant Aspects of the Profile of Russian Guests
Russian mentality
Language
Spread of people from Russian ethnic origin abroad
Religion
Social status
Habits
Tipping
Body language
Russian Outbound Market vs. Others
Conclusion
References
Russian Key words
Russian Phrases
Russian is the only federally official language in the country. It belongs to the East Slavic languages. It uses Russian alphabet of the Cyrillic script.
Relevant statistics:
- 154 million native speakers & over 258 million total speakers worldwide
- the world’s 7th most spoken language by number of native speakers (ULG 2023)
- the world’s 8th most spoken language by total number of speakers (Ethnologue 2022)
- one of the six official languages of the United Nations (UN 2023)
- one of two official languages aboard International Space Station (NASA 2004)
- the most spoken Slavic and the most spoken language in Europe (Tandem 2022)
- besides Russia, it’s one of the official languages in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Belarus
- used widely as a lingua franca throughout Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and to some extent in the Baltic states and continues to be used in public life with varying proficiency in all of the post-Soviet states (Wikipedia 2023a). According to a study conducted by the Ukrainian leading research institute Razumkov Centre, in 2015, 22% of Ukrainians use both Ukrainian and Russian equally at home and 21% communicate bilingually at work; the percentage of those using only Russian at work is as high as the percentage of Ukrainian users (37%) (ibid.). In Lithuania, Russian-speakers make up 15% of the entire population, in Latvia – 34% and in Estonia – 30% (Grigas 2014).
- more than 850,000 Americans speak Russian at home (ULG 2023).