Russian is an Indo-European language, giving it a shared heritage with the Germanic, Romance, Persian, and Hindi branches. Its closest relatives, however, are the other Slavic languages, such as Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, and Bulgarian.

Russian evolved from East Slavic, the language of Kievan Rus, the predecessor of Russia. Ironically centered around Kyiv, the capital of modern Ukraine.

Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, along with English, French, Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish. All formal UN documents are published in each of these languages.

Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, which contains 33 letters. Like the Latin alphabet, it was derived from the Greek script. Originally, Cyrillic had over 40 letters, but many were removed during a reform in 1918.

Russian does not have a common way to express “to be.” For example, instead of saying He is a chef, Russians simply say He chef.

Russian also lacks equivalents to the articles a or the. Despite being a European language, it shares this trait with many Asian languages.

Russian has more words for the color blue than English does.

Many Russian words are loanwords, most commonly borrowed from French, German, and Italian. With the modern day, many English words have flown into Russian.

While Russian generally follows subject–verb–object word order, its grammar is far more flexible than English.

The first printed book in Cyrillic Russian was the Slavic Orthodox text known as Fiol’s Octoechos, published in 1491.

Russia stopped using Cyrillic for numbers after Peter the Great introduced Hindu–Arabic numerals.

In Russian, double negatives intensify the meaning instead of canceling each other out, as they do in English.

Some Russian surnames change according to gender, for instance, Ivanov for men and Ivanova for women. Since Ivan is the Russian equivalent of John, Ivanov essentially means “Johnson.”

The Russian word for ladybug translates literally as “God’s little cow.”