Today I want to write about a language that is very close to my own heart considering I spent my entire undergraduate career studying it. This beautiful, complex language is Russian and has led to my personal love affair of the literature and culture. Russian is the most widely spoken language in Europe and the most widespread of the Slavic languages. It is the first language to about 145 million people worldwide and the second language to an additional 110 million.

Russian is the official language of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan as well as one of the official languages of the United Nations. It belongs to the family of Indo-European languages, and is therefore related to Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, as well as the modern Germanic, Romance, and Celtic languages including English, French, and Irish, respectively.

Russian is written using a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet, consisting of 33 letters. Setting up Russian documents as Word files and as content on websites requires some preparation and knowledge of Cyrillic typesetting issues. Using standard Windows-based Unicode fonts and choosing Cyrillic encoding does the trick for Russian text in most cases. There are certain Unicode fonts for Windows that contain correctly addressed Russian characters, e.g. Arial, Courier, Tahoma, Times and Times New Roman. Please keep in mind that Cyrillic will not display correctly if Unicode fonts are not used. If you ever have any questions about the written language you should always feel free to ask your Language Service Provider who can guide you through the unique Cyrillic typesetting issues.

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Maggie
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