While preserving much of its ancient synthetic-inflectional structure and Slavonic word base, modern Russian draws on international vocabulary for politics, science and technology.

• It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet.
• The standard Russian Cyrillic alphabet has 33 characters, some of which resemble Latin characters.
• There are ten vowel characters, twenty one consonant characters and two sign characters (a soft sign and a hard sign, which do not have a sound of their own).
• It has six cases and three declensions.
• It has three verb tenses (present, past and future) and two aspects (imperfective and perfective).
• Russian was the language of the world-renowned poet Aleksandr Pushkin, two of the greatest novelists in world literature, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the playwright Anton Chekhov.
• In the 20th century, leading figures of Russian literature included internationally acclaimed poets Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova and prose writers Vladimir Nabokov, Mikhail Bulgakov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
• Russian was the mother tongue of composers Tchaikovsky, Rahmaninov and Stravinsky, and artists Repin, Aivazovskii and Chagal.

Why learn Russian at Carleton University?

• Russia has undergone dramatic changes in the last decade. The fall of the Soviet Union and the beginning of liberalization of the Russian economy have contributed to a growth in potential of the Russian market and increased foreign investment in the Russian economy.
• Business analysts around the world predict further growth of Russia’s trade volume.
• Russia is the world’s largest oil producer; worldwide oil consumption continues to grow.
• This inevitably leads to an increase in demand for various qualified foreign specialists who can speak Russian.
• Russia is known for its rich, fascinating history, politics and culture, which can be uncomparably better understood if you speak the Russian language.
• Learning the Russian language is personally challenging, and stimulating.