Russian

Member of the majority ethnic group living in Russia. Russians are also often the largest minority in neighbouring republics. The Russian language is a member of the East Slavonic branch of the Indo-European language family and was the official language of the USSR. It has 130–150 million speakers and is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. The ancestors of the Russians migrated from central Europe in the 6th–8th centuries AD.

The people of Russia proper have traditionally referred to their language as Great Russian, in contrast with Ukrainian (which they call Little Russian) and the language of Belarus (White Russian). Ukrainians have traditionally objected to this usage, arguing that theirs is a distinct language. Even before the 1917 revolution, Russian language and culture was imposed on the country's minorities; this was to some extent reversed in the face of growing nationalist feeling in many of the republics of the USSR, and subsequently in those of the Russian Federation.