Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet and is an official language of both Russia and Belarus.
Russian is an East Slavic language of the Indo-European family. It is the most widely spoken native language in Europe and serves as a lingua franca across parts of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Russian is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations.
Its modern alphabet is a form of Cyrillic, a writing tradition developed for Slavic languages in the medieval period. Russian spelling uses 33 letters, including the soft sign and hard sign, which do not represent ordinary consonant or vowel sounds in the same way as most alphabetic letters.
Russian is closely related to Ukrainian and Belarusian, but each is a distinct standardized language with its own history, vocabulary, pronunciation, and literary traditions.