An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect, although it vanished during the 15th or 16th century, is sometimes considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian.

[38] Over the course of centuries, the vocabulary and literary style of Russian have also been influenced by Western and Central European languages such as Greek, Latin, Polish, Dutch, German, French, Italian, and English,[39] and to a lesser extent the languages to the south and the east: Uralic, Turkic,[40][41] Persian,[42][43] Arabic, and Hebrew.

The initial impulse for standardization came from the government bureaucracy for the lack of a reliable tool of communication in administrative, legal, and judicial affairs became an obvious practical problem.

The earliest attempts at standardizing Russian were made based on the so-called Moscow official or chancery language, during the 15th to 17th centuries.

However, the peasants' speech was never systematically studied, as it was generally regarded by philologists as simply a source of folklore and an object of curiosity.

"[48] After 1917, Marxist linguists had no interest in the multiplicity of peasant dialects and regarded their language as a relic of the rapidly disappearing past that was not worthy of scholarly attention.

Nakhimovsky quotes the Soviet academicians A.M Ivanov and L.P Yakubinsky, writing in 1930: The language of peasants has a motley diversity inherited from feudalism.

Therefore, the Russian language is the seventh-largest in the world by the number of speakers, after English, Mandarin, Hindi-Urdu, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Portuguese.

[62][63] On 29 September 2022, Saeima passed in the final reading amendments that state that all schools and kindergartens in the country are to transition to education in Latvian.

The financing of Russian-language content by the state will cease, which the concept says create a "unified information space".

[54] On 21 January 2021, the Constitutional Court of Moldova declared the law unconstitutional and deprived Russian of the status of the language of interethnic communication.

On the other hand, before the war, almost a quarter of Ukrainians were in favour of granting Russian the status of the state language, while after the beginning of Russia's invasion the support for the idea dropped to just 7%.

[82] In the 20th century, Russian was a mandatory language taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other countries that used to be satellites of the USSR.

[54] The 2009 census reported that 10,309,500 people, or 84.8% of the population aged 15 and above, could read and write well in Russian, and understand the spoken language.

[95] In Vietnam, Russian has been added in the elementary curriculum along with Chinese and Japanese and were named as "first foreign languages" for Vietnamese students to learn, on equal footing with English.

Sizable Russian-speaking communities also exist in North America, especially in large urban centers of the US and Canada, such as New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, Nashville, San Francisco, Seattle, Spokane, Toronto, Calgary, Baltimore, Miami, Portland, Chicago, Denver, and Cleveland.

In a number of locations they issue their own newspapers, and live in ethnic enclaves (especially the generation of immigrants who started arriving in the early 1960s).

Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the overwhelming majority of Russophones in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in New York City were Russian-speaking Jews.

Websites in former Soviet Union member states also used high levels of Russian: 79.0% in Ukraine, 86.9% in Belarus, 84.0% in Kazakhstan, 79.6% in Uzbekistan, 75.9% in Kyrgyzstan and 81.8% in Tajikistan.

Some linguists divide the dialects of Russian into two primary regional groupings, "Northern" and "Southern", with Moscow lying on the zone of transition between the two.

[102][103] The Northern Russian dialects and those spoken along the Volga River typically pronounce unstressed /o/ clearly, a phenomenon called okanye (оканье).

[103] Besides the absence of vowel reduction, some dialects have high or diphthongal /e⁓i̯ɛ/ in place of Proto-Slavic *ě and /o⁓u̯ɔ/ in stressed closed syllables (as in Ukrainian) instead of Standard Russian /e/ and /o/, respectively.

[103] Another Northern dialectal morphological feature is a post-posed definite article -to, -ta, -te similar to that existing in Bulgarian and Macedonian.

[103][105] During the Proto-Slavic (Common Slavic) times all Slavs spoke one mutually intelligible language or group of dialects.

Once commonly used by the majority of those living outside Russia, transliteration is being used less frequently by Russian-speaking typists in favor of the extension of Unicode character encoding, which fully incorporates the Russian alphabet.

For example, it is used to distinguish between otherwise identical words, especially when context does not make it obvious: замо́к (zamók – "lock") – за́мок (zámok – "castle"), сто́ящий (stóyashchy – "worthwhile") – стоя́щий (stoyáshchy – "standing"), чудно́ (chudnó – "this is odd") – чу́дно (chúdno – "this is marvellous"), молоде́ц (molodéts – "well done!")

– мо́лодец (mólodets – "fine young man"), узна́ю (uznáyu – "I shall learn it") – узнаю́ (uznayú – "I recognize it"), отреза́ть (otrezát – "to be cutting") – отре́зать (otrézat – "to have cut"); to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words, especially personal and family names, like афе́ра (aféra, "scandal, affair"), гу́ру (gúru, "guru"), Гарси́я (García), Оле́ша (Olésha), Фе́рми (Fermi), and to show which is the stressed word in a sentence, for example Ты́ съел печенье?

According to some linguists, the "plain" consonants are velarized as in Irish, something which is most noticeable when it involves a labial before a hard vowel, such as мы, /mˠɨː/, "we" , or бэ, /bˠɛ/, "the letter Б".

[116] In terms of actual grammar, there are three tenses in Russian – past, present, and future – and each verb has two aspects (perfective and imperfective).

Many Russian novels of the 19th century, e.g. Leo Tolstoy's (Лев Толсто́й) War and Peace, contain entire paragraphs and even pages in French with no translation given, with an assumption that educated readers would not need one.