Abaza is a Northwest Caucasian language spoken by Abazins in Russia. The language has gone through several different orthographies based primarily on Latin and Cyrillic letters. Its consonant-to-vowel ratio is remarkably high; making it quite similar to many other languages from the same parent chain. The language evolved in popularity in the mid to late 1800s, but has become an endangered language.
Tajik, Tajik Persian, Tajiki Persian, also called Tajiki, is the variety of Persian spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan by Tajiks. It is closely related to neighbouring Dari of Afghanistan with which it forms a continuum of mutually intelligible varieties of the Persian language. Several scholars consider Tajik as a dialectal variety of Persian rather than a language on its own. The popularity of this conception of Tajik as a variety of Persian was such that, during the period in which Tajik intellectuals were trying to establish Tajik as a language separate from Persian, prominent intellectual Sadriddin Ayni counterargued that Tajik was not a "bastardised dialect" of Persian. The issue of whether Tajik and Persian are to be considered two dialects of a single language or two discrete languages has political aspects to it.
The Mari language, formerly known as the Cheremiss language, spoken by approximately 400,000 people, belongs to the Uralic language family. It is spoken primarily in the Mari Republic of the Russian Federation, as well as in the area along the Vyatka river basin and eastwards to the Urals. Mari speakers, known as the Mari, are found also in the Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Udmurtia, and Perm regions.
Komi-Permyak language, also known as Permyak, is one of two Permic varieties in the Uralic language family that form a pluricentric language, the other being Komi-Zyryan.
Kalmyk Oirat, commonly known as the Kalmyk language, is a variety of the Mongolian language, natively spoken by the Kalmyk people of Kalmykia, a federal subject of Russia. In Russia, it is the standard form of the Oirat Mongolian, which belongs to the Mongolic language family. The Kalmyk people of the Northwest Caspian Sea of Russia claim descent from the Oirats from Eurasia, who have also historically settled in Mongolia and Northwest China. According to UNESCO, the language is "definitely endangered". According to the Russian census of 2021, there are 110,000 speakers out of an ethnic population consisting of 178,000 people.
Russian is an East Slavic language of the Indo-European family. All Indo-European languages are descendants of a single prehistoric language, reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic era. Although no written records remain, much of the culture and religion of the Proto-Indo-European people can also be reconstructed based on their daughter cultures traditionally and continuing to inhabit most of Europe and South Asia, areas to where the Proto-Indo-Europeans migrated from their original homeland.
Kumyk is a Turkic language spoken by about 520,000 people, mainly by the Kumyks, in the Dagestan, North Ossetia and Chechen republics of the Russian Federation. Until the 20th century Kumyk was the lingua franca of the Northern Caucasus.
The phonology of the Persian language varies between regional dialects and standard varieties. Persian is a pluricentric language and countries that have Persian as an official language have separate standard varieties, namely: Standard Dari (Afghanistan), Standard Iranian Persian (Iran) and Standard Tajik (Tajikistan). The most significant differences between standard varieties of Persian are their vowel systems. Standard varieties of Persian have anywhere from 6 to 8 vowel distinctions, and similar vowels may be pronounced differently between standards. However, there are not many notable differences when comparing consonants, as all standard varieties have a similar number of consonant sounds. Though, colloquial varieties generally have more differences than their standard counterparts. Most dialects feature contrastive stress and syllable-final consonant clusters. Linguists tend to focus on Iranian Persian, so this article may contain less adequate information regarding other varieties.
The Yaghnobi Tajiks, commonly referred to as Yaghnobis, are an Eastern Iranian people residing in Tajikistan's Sughd province, specifically in the valleys of the Yaghnob, Qul, and Varzob rivers. Although they are considered part of the broader Tajik ethnicity, they are distinguished from other Tajiks by their use of the Yaghnobi language, an eastern Iranian language.
The Sarikoli language is a member of the Pamir subgroup of the Southeastern Iranian languages spoken by the Pamiris of Xinjiang, China. It is officially referred to in China as the "Tajik language", although it is different from the related Iranian language spoken in Tajikistan, which is a dialect of Persian.
The Nanai language is spoken by the Nanai people in Siberia, and to a much smaller extent in China's Heilongjiang province, where it is known as Hezhe. The language has about 1,400 speakers out of 17,000 ethnic Nanai, but most are also fluent in Russian or Chinese, and mostly use one of those languages for communication.
In the pronunciation of the Russian language, several ways of vowel reduction are distinguished between the standard language and dialects. Russian orthography most often does not reflect vowel reduction, which can confuse foreign-language learners, but some spelling reforms have changed some words.
Numerous Cyrillic alphabets are based on the Cyrillic script. The early Cyrillic alphabet was developed in the 9th century AD and replaced the earlier Glagolitic script developed by the theologians Cyril and Methodius. It is the basis of alphabets used in various languages, past and present, Slavic origin, and non-Slavic languages influenced by Russian. As of 2011, around 252 million people in Eurasia use it as the official alphabet for their national languages. About half of them are in Russia. Cyrillic is one of the most-used writing systems in the world. The creator is Saint Clement of Ohrid from the Preslav literary school in the First Bulgarian Empire.
In phonetics and phonology, relative articulation is description of the manner and place of articulation of a speech sound relative to some reference point. Typically, the comparison is made with a default, unmarked articulation of the same phoneme in a neutral sound environment. For example, the English velar consonant is fronted before the vowel compared to articulation of before other vowels. This fronting is called palatalization.
The Cyrillic script family contains many specially treated two-letter combinations, or digraphs, but few of these are used in Slavic languages. In a few alphabets, trigraphs and even the occasional tetragraph or pentagraph are used.
Ossetian, commonly referred to as Ossetic and rarely as Ossete, is an Eastern Iranian language that is spoken predominantly in Ossetia, a region situated on both sides of the Russian-Georgian border in the Greater Caucasus region. It is the native language of the Ossetian people, and a relative and possibly a descendant of the extinct Scythian, Sarmatian, and Alanic languages.
This article discusses the phonological system of standard Russian based on the Moscow dialect. For an overview of dialects in the Russian language, see Russian dialects. Most descriptions of Russian describe it as having five vowel phonemes, though there is some dispute over whether a sixth vowel,, is separate from. Russian has 34 consonants, which can be divided into two types:
Cyrillization of Arabic is the conversion of text written in Arabic script into Cyrillic script. Because the Arabic script is an abjad, an accurate transliteration into Cyrillic, an alphabet, would still require prior knowledge of the subject language to read. Instead, systems of transcription have normally been used.
The Komi language, a Uralic language spoken in the north-eastern part of European Russia, has been written in several different alphabets. Currently, Komi writing uses letters from the Cyrillic script. There have been five distinct stages in the history of Komi writing:
Mansi alphabets are a writing system used to write the Mansi languages. During its existence, it functioned on different graphic bases and was repeatedly reformed. At present day, the Mansi writing functions in Cyrillic. There are 3 stages in the history of Mansi writing:
