Russia's 160 ethnic groups speak some 100 languages.[10] According to the 2002 census, 142.6 million people speak Russian, followed by Tatar with 5.3 million and Ukrainian with 1.8 million speakers.[126] Russian is the only official state language, but the Constitution gives the individual republics the right to make their native language co-official next to Russian.[127]
Despite its wide dispersal, the Russian language is homogeneous throughout Russia. Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken Slavic language.[128] It belongs to the Indo-European language family and is one of the living members of the East Slavic languages; the others being Belarusian and Ukrainian (and possibly Rusyn). Written examples of Old East Slavic (Old Russian) are attested from the 10th century onwards.[129]
The Russian Language Center says a quarter of the world's scientific literature is published in Russian.[130] It is also applied as a means of coding and storage of universal knowledge—60–70% of all world information is published in the English and Russian languages.[130] Russian is one of the six official languages of the UN
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