Languages in my country

Russia is a large multinational and multilingual country. In General, the approximate number of languages counted by linguists is about 140-150. The official language in Russia is Russian. It is spoken by about 97.8 % of Russians. But what about other languages in different regions of our country?

• The most part of languages in Russia derive from one of four big language families: Indo-European, Altaic, Uralic and Caucasian ones. Each family has a common language-ancestor. Ancient tribes who spoke the same languages migrated, mixed with other Nations, and once a single language broke up into several. This led to the diversity of the language. For now, The Russian language belongs to the Indo-European family. In the same family - English and German, Spanish, Hindi and many others.
• Altai family in Russia is represented by three groups: Turkic, Mongolian and Tungus-Manchurian. There are only two peoples speaking Mongolian languages - Buryats and Kalmyks. But the variety of languages in each group of the Altai family is very large. It includes Tatar, Bashkir, Yakut, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Uzbek and other languages. Most of these peoples live in Russia.
• The Uralic language family includes the Finno-Ugric and Samoyed groups. In Russia, there are not many people who speak the languages of these groups, mainly due to the fact that the majority of the peoples of these language groups in Russia are small.
• Northern Caucasian family — the proposed merger of the two groups of Caucasian languages — Abkhaz-Adyghe and Nakh-Daghestanian. With the first often bring together the hattic language, hurrite-Urartian languages. The languages of this hypothetical family are common in the North Caucasus, as well as in the large Diaspora in the middle East. It includes more than 40 languages.

According to the materials of the all-Russian population census of 2002, Russian is spoken by about 142.6 million people, English (foreign) — 7 million people, Tatar - 5.4 million people, German (foreign, native) — 2.9 million , Ukrainian — 1.9 million people, Bashkir language is spoken by 1.4 million people, Chechen language — 1.4 million people, Chuvash language — about 1.3 million people. And these are only the languages spoken by more than a million people. Some languages are very similar: people can speak each other and understand each other perfectly, for example, a Russian person will understand a Belarusian, a Tatar will understand a Bashkir, a Kalmyk will be able to talk to a Buryat.

Russia is a very large country, but still United. We share not only a common language, but also traditions and culture, but most importantly, we will always be United by a common history of our country.