Russian (Russian: русский язык, transliteration: russkiy yaz'ik) is a Slavic language. It is the main language spoken in Russia.
Written Russian does not use the Latin alphabet that English and the West Slavic languages do - some people do however, learn to write it in Latin letters. It mostly uses the Cyrillic alphabet, whose letters, like those of Latin, came from Greek, but are different from them. The other East Slavic languages and some of the South Slavic languages use the Cyrillic alphabet as well.
Standard Russian is also called modern literary Russian (Современный русский литературный язык). It first appeared at the beginning of the 18th century.
All of Russia began to use Russian as the language of literature, education, and official communication. Until the 20th century, only the upper classes and people in cities spoke the literary language. Russians from the countryside continued to speak their local dialects.
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