Russian philology
Russians in the world and total population in Russia.
Dialects
Russian is a rather homogeneous language, in terms of dialectal variation, due to the early
political centralization under the Moscow rule, compulsory education, mass migration from
rural to urban areas in the 20th century, as well as other factors. The standard language is used
in written and spoken form almost everywhere in the country, from Kaliningrad and Saint
Petersburg in the West to Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky in the East,
notwithstanding the enormous distance in between.
Despite leveling after 1900, especially in matters of vocabulary and phonetics, a number of
dialects still exist in Russia. Some linguists divide the dialects of Russian into two primary
regional groupings, "Northern" and "Southern", with Moscow lying on the zone of transition
between the two. Others divide the language into three groupings, Northern, Central (or
Middle) and Southern, with Moscow lying in the Central region