114-608: VK (short for its original name VKontakte ; Russian : ВКонтакте , meaning InContact ) is a Russian online social media and social networking service based in Saint Petersburg . VK is available in multiple languages but it is predominantly used by Russian speakers . VK users can message each other publicly or privately, edit these messages, create groups , public pages, and events; share and tag images, audio, and video; and play browser-based games. As of August 2018, VK had at least 500 million accounts. As of November 2022, it
228-649: A constitutional referendum on whether to adopt Russian as a second official language. According to the Central Election Commission, 74.8% voted against, 24.9% voted for and the voter turnout was 71.1%. Starting in 2019, instruction in Russian will be gradually discontinued in private colleges and universities in Latvia, and in general instruction in Latvian public high schools. On 29 September 2022, Saeima passed in
342-510: A new education law which requires all schools to teach at least partially in Ukrainian, with provisions while allow indigenous languages and languages of national minorities to be used alongside the national language. The law faced criticism from officials in Russia and Hungary. The 2019 Law of Ukraine "On protecting the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the state language" gives priority to
456-541: A company belonging to him and his son Yitzchak Mirilashvili , owns several data centers. Mikhael Mirilashvili and his family donated to Rabbi Yitzchak Dovid Grossman ’s “Migdalor” association. Mirilashvili also donated several Torah scrolls to different units in the IDF through the ‘Friends of the IDF’ and other associations. He also contributed to the ZAKA delegation, serving as chairman for
570-604: A formula with V standing for the nucleus (vowel) and C for each consonant, the maximal structure can be described as follows: (C)(C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C) Mikhael Mirilashvili Mikhael Mirilashvili ( Georgian : მიხო მირილაშვილი , Hebrew : מיכאל מירילשוילי ; born May 1960) is a Russian - Israeli - Georgian businessman and philanthropist, based in Russia and Israel. Mirilashvili’s business enterprises operate primarily in real estate, construction of shopping malls, casino chains, petroleum industry, and renewable energy sectors, as well as in new media ( VK.com ). Mirilashvili
684-506: A joint Israeli-Emirati Water Research Institute in Abu Dhabi with Tel Aviv University . Mirilashvili's elderly father was kidnapped on a highway in August 2000 while driving in his Lexus LS , by a group pretending to be traffic police. The group was apparently unaware of who they had kidnapped and had not seen the logo of the family's casino company on the numberplate. A couple of days later, he
798-479: A language that "belongs to the European cultural space". The financing of Russian-language content by the state will cease, which the concept says create a "unified information space". However, one inevitable consequence would be the closure of public media broadcasts in Russian on LTV and Latvian Radio, as well as the closure of LSM's Russian-language service. In Lithuania , Russian has no official or legal status, but
912-572: A lesser extent the languages to the south and the east: Uralic , Turkic , Persian , Arabic , and Hebrew . According to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California , Russian is classified as a level III language in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers, requiring approximately 1,100 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency. Feudal divisions and conflicts created obstacles between
1026-607: A minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . 30% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 2% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Azerbaijan , Russian has no official status, but is a lingua franca of the country. 26% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 5% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Georgia , Russian has no official status, but it
1140-520: A multiple winner of international math and programming competitions, to develop the site. Durov launched VKontakte for beta testing in September 2006. The following month, the domain name Vkontakte.ru was registered. The new project was incorporated on 19 January 2007 as a Russian private limited company. In February 2007 the site reached a user base of over 100,000 and was recognized as the second largest company in Russia's nascent social network market. In
1254-522: A programming championship for young programmers aged 13–23, was held on 16 July 2012 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. VK and Codeforces co-organized the second VK Cup programming championship, which took place from 24 to 27 July 2015. The winners received a total of 1,048,576 or 2 rubles (an amount related to round binary numbers). The third VK Cup took place from 1 to 4 July 2016 and had a prize pool of 2.5 million rubles. VK and Codeforces co-organized
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#17331070706201368-516: A qualitatively new entity can be said to emerge—the general language of the working class... capitalism has the tendency of creating the general urban language of a given society. In 2010, there were 259.8 million speakers of Russian in the world: in Russia – 137.5 million, in the CIS and Baltic countries – 93.7 million, in Eastern Europe – 12.9 million, Western Europe – 7.3 million, Asia – 2.7 million, in
1482-557: A real-time news search. VK updated its features and design in April 2016. As of May 2017, according to Alexa Internet ranking, VK is one of the most visited websites in some Eurasian countries. It is: It was the fourth most viewed site in Ukraine until, in May 2017, the Ukrainian government banned the use of VK in Ukraine. According to a study for May 2018 conducted by Factum Group Ukraine VK remained
1596-414: A recording studio, when the same court ordered VK to pay $ 7000 for not being active enough in regard to copyrighted materials. VK offers a content removal tool for copyright holders. Large-scale copyright holders may gain access to bulk content removal tools. Since 2010, VK has also entered several partnerships with legal content providers such as television networks. and streaming providers. Most notably,
1710-553: A result, mafia members were kidnapped to be delivered to the office of the company "Petromir", which belongs to the family. There, under torture, they told the coordinates of kidnappers of Mirilashvili-senior, then after his release they too were executed. The original kidnappers themselves were later found dead in Saint Isaac's Square. A group of well-known Russian figures including Andrei Petrov , Oleg Basilashvili , Mikhail Boyarsky and poet and singer Alexander Rosenbaum protested
1824-520: A total of 24.99% of the shares from shareholders, investing $ 16.3 million. In preparation for the IPO in September 2010, DST separated international and Russian assets: the former formed the DST Global fund, while the latter, including VKontakte and rival social network Odnoklassniki , were merged into Mail.ru Group . Mail.ru Group used part of the money to acquire 7.5% of the social network for $ 112.5 million at
1938-506: A valuation of the entire project of 1.5 billion dollars. After exercising a 7.5% option in July 2011 for $ 111.7 million, Mail.ru Group accumulated a 39.99% stake in VKontakte. The head of Mail.ru Group, Dmitry Grishin , voiced the company's intention to gain 100% control over VKontakte. MRG was discussing with shareholders to buy out shares from the valuation of the entire company in $ 2-3 billion. In
2052-462: A venture capital fund, as well as Flarium Global, Be’er Isaac Energy, and Hoshen Argaman. The Mirilashvili family is one of the founders of Vkontakte , a Russian social network which they launched in 2006. They sold their shares in the company in 2013, receiving $ 1.12 billion for them. Last year, the family also began to invest in gas drilling projects in Israel . "Selectel" ( Russian : "Селектел" ),
2166-573: A weekend in July at the 300th Anniversary Park [ ru ] (Russian: Парк имени 300-летия Санкт-Петербурга) in St. Petersburg, Russia. According to data from the organizer, 70 thousand people attended the festival in 2016, with the number rising to 85 thousand attendees in 2017. In 2017, around 40 artists and groups performed on 3 stages, including Little Big , The Hatters , and others. Bloggers and other famous individuals, such as Dmitry Grishin , Timur Bekmambetov , and Mikhail Piotrovsky (speakers at
2280-527: Is Belarusian, among ethnic Belarusians this share is 28.5%; the highest share of those who speak Belarusian at home is among ethnic Poles — 46.0%. In Estonia , Russian is spoken by 29.6% of the population, according to a 2011 estimate from the World Factbook, and is officially considered a foreign language. School education in the Russian language is a very contentious point in Estonian politics, and in 2022,
2394-475: Is a co-official language per article 5 of the Constitution of Kyrgyzstan . The 2009 census states that 482,200 people speak Russian as a native language, or 8.99% of the population. Additionally, 1,854,700 residents of Kyrgyzstan aged 15 and above fluently speak Russian as a second language, or 49.6% of the population in the age group. In Tajikistan , Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication under
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#17331070706202508-401: Is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian , and a moderate degree of it in all modern Slavic languages, at least at the conversational level. Russian is written using a Cyrillic alphabet. The Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters. The following table gives their forms, along with IPA values for each letter's typical sound: Older letters of
2622-593: Is a post-posed definite article -to , -ta , -te similar to that existing in Bulgarian and Macedonian. In the Southern Russian dialects , instances of unstressed /e/ and /a/ following palatalized consonants and preceding a stressed syllable are not reduced to [ɪ] (as occurs in the Moscow dialect), being instead pronounced [a] in such positions (e.g. несл и is pronounced [nʲaˈslʲi] , not [nʲɪsˈlʲi] ) – this
2736-485: Is being used less frequently by Russian-speaking typists in favor of the extension of Unicode character encoding , which fully incorporates the Russian alphabet. Free programs are available offering this Unicode extension, which allow users to type Russian characters, even on Western 'QWERTY' keyboards. The Russian language was first introduced to computing after the M-1 , and MESM models were produced in 1951. According to
2850-613: Is called yakanye ( яканье ). Consonants include a fricative /ɣ/ , a semivowel /w⁓u̯/ and /x⁓xv⁓xw/ , whereas the Standard and Northern dialects have the consonants /ɡ/ , /v/ , and final /l/ and /f/ , respectively. The morphology features a palatalized final /tʲ/ in 3rd person forms of verbs (this is unpalatalized in the Standard and Northern dialects). During the Proto-Slavic (Common Slavic) times all Slavs spoke one mutually intelligible language or group of dialects. There
2964-563: Is more spoken than English. Sizable Russian-speaking communities also exist in North America, especially in large urban centers of the US and Canada, such as New York City , Philadelphia , Boston , Los Angeles , Nashville , San Francisco , Seattle , Spokane , Toronto , Calgary , Baltimore , Miami , Portland , Chicago , Denver , and Cleveland . In a number of locations they issue their own newspapers, and live in ethnic enclaves (especially
3078-564: Is odd") – чу́дно ( chúdno – "this is marvellous"), молоде́ц ( molodéts – "well done!") – мо́лодец ( mólodets – "fine young man"), узна́ю ( uznáyu – "I shall learn it") – узнаю́ ( uznayú – "I recognize it"), отреза́ть ( otrezát – "to be cutting") – отре́зать ( otrézat – "to have cut"); to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words, especially personal and family names, like афе́ра ( aféra , "scandal, affair"), гу́ру ( gúru , "guru"), Гарси́я ( García ), Оле́ша ( Olésha ), Фе́рми ( Fermi ), and to show which
3192-402: Is recognized as a minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . Russian is the language of 9% of the population according to the World Factbook. Ethnologue cites Russian as the country's de facto working language. In China , Russian has no official status, but it is spoken by the small Russian communities in the northeastern Heilongjiang and
3306-569: Is sometimes considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. Also, Russian has notable lexical similarities with Bulgarian due to a common Church Slavonic influence on both languages, but because of later interaction in the 19th and 20th centuries, Bulgarian grammar differs markedly from Russian. Over the course of centuries, the vocabulary and literary style of Russian have also been influenced by Western and Central European languages such as Greek, Latin , Polish , Dutch , German, French, Italian, and English, and to
3420-576: Is spoken by 14.2% of the population according to an undated estimate from the World Factbook. In 2005, Russian was the most widely taught foreign language in Mongolia, and was compulsory in Year 7 onward as a second foreign language in 2006. Around 1.5 million Israelis spoke Russian as of 2017. The Israeli press and websites regularly publish material in Russian and there are Russian newspapers, television stations, schools, and social media outlets based in
3534-615: Is the president of the Saint Petersburg Jewish Congress. Mirilashvili was born to a Jewish family in May 1960 in Kulashi , a small town in Georgia. In 1977, he moved to St. Petersburg , then known as Leningrad . Originally trained as a mathematician, he qualified as a medical doctor from Saint-Petersburg University, and became a doctor, specializing in pediatrics. In the early 80s, Mirilashvili joined his family’s business, which
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3648-518: Is the stressed word in a sentence, for example Ты́ съел печенье? ( Tý syel pechenye? – "Was it you who ate the cookie?") – Ты съе́л печенье? ( Ty syél pechenye? – "Did you eat the cookie?) – Ты съел пече́нье? ( Ty syel pechénye? "Was it the cookie you ate?"). Stress marks are mandatory in lexical dictionaries and books for children or Russian learners. The Russian syllable structure can be quite complex, with both initial and final consonant clusters of up to four consecutive sounds. Using
3762-464: Is usually shown in writing not by a change of the consonant but rather by changing the following vowel. Another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels . Stress , which is often unpredictable, is not normally indicated orthographically , though an optional acute accent may be used to mark stress – such as to distinguish between homographic words (e.g. замо́к [ zamók , 'lock'] and за́мок [ zámok , 'castle']), or to indicate
3876-461: The 2011 Lithuanian census , Russian was the native language for 7.2% of the population. In Moldova , Russian was considered to be the language of interethnic communication under a Soviet-era law. On 21 January 2021, the Constitutional Court of Moldova declared the law unconstitutional and deprived Russian of the status of the language of interethnic communication. 50% of the population
3990-916: The Apollo–Soyuz mission, which first flew in 1975. In March 2013, Russian was found to be the second-most used language on websites after English. Russian was the language of 5.9% of all websites, slightly ahead of German and far behind English (54.7%). Russian was used not only on 89.8% of .ru sites, but also on 88.7% of sites with the former Soviet Union domain .su . Websites in former Soviet Union member states also used high levels of Russian: 79.0% in Ukraine, 86.9% in Belarus, 84.0% in Kazakhstan, 79.6% in Uzbekistan, 75.9% in Kyrgyzstan and 81.8% in Tajikistan. However, Russian
4104-413: The Constitution of Tajikistan and is permitted in official documentation. 28% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 7% used it as the main language with family, friends or at work. The World Factbook notes that Russian is widely used in government and business. In Turkmenistan , Russian lost its status as the official lingua franca in 1996. Among 12% of the population who grew up in
4218-674: The Mail.ru group bought the remaining 48% stake of VK from United Capital Partners (UCP) for $ 1.5 billion, thus becoming the sole proprietor of the social network. In December 2021, Russian state-owned bank Gazprombank and insurance company Sogaz bought out 57.3% of VK shares, thus becoming the holders of the company's controlling interest . In 2008, the leading Russian television channel TV Russia (TV channel name RTR used in 1991–2002, then Russia 1) and television company VGTRK sued VKontakte (then VK) over unlicensed copies of two of its films which had been uploaded by VK users. In 2010, this dispute
4332-849: The Russian Jewish Congress , first vice president of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress , president of the Maccabi Union in Russia and president of the " Torah and Chessed " Center for Jews in Georgia. Mirilashvili established the Moshe Mirilashvili Center for Food Security in the Desert at the Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2021 in memory of his father. He also supports
4446-575: The Ukrainian language in more than 30 spheres of public life: in particular in public administration , media, education, science, culture, advertising, services . The law does not regulate private communication. A poll conducted in March 2022 by RATING in the territory controlled by Ukraine found that 83% of the respondents believe that Ukrainian should be the only state language of Ukraine. This opinion dominates in all macro-regions, age and language groups. On
4560-694: The United States Census , in 2007 Russian was the primary language spoken in the homes of over 850,000 individuals living in the United States. Russian is one of the official languages (or has similar status and interpretation must be provided into Russian) of the following: The Russian language is also one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station – NASA astronauts who serve alongside Russian cosmonauts usually take Russian language courses. This practice goes back to
4674-550: The fourth most widely used language on the Internet . Russian is written using the Russian alphabet of the Cyrillic script ; it distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without—the so-called "soft" and "hard" sounds. Almost every consonant has a hard or soft counterpart, and the distinction is a prominent feature of the language, which
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4788-483: The 1990s, his bank Viking ( Russian : «Викинг» ) became very large in St. Petersburg and the north-west of Russia. Mirilashvili is also the president of CONTI, the largest gambling corporation in St. Petersburg, with six casinos and other gambling venues. His Jackpot ( Russian : "Джекпот" ) slot machine network is the largest in Europe. Mirilashvili established several companies in Israel in recent years, including Kitaim,
4902-603: The 2017 festival), are also an important part of the festival. More than 1.5 million people watched the festival's official live stream. Russian language Russian is an East Slavic language belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family . It is one of the four extant East Slavic languages, and is the native language of the Russians . It was the de facto and de jure official language of
5016-508: The 20th century, Russian was a mandatory language taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other countries that used to be satellites of the USSR. According to the Eurobarometer 2005 survey, fluency in Russian remains fairly high (20–40%) in some countries, in particular former Warsaw Pact countries. In Armenia , Russian has no official status, but it is recognized as
5130-465: The Belarusian society the Russian language prevails, so according to the 2019 census 6,718,557 people (71.4% of the total population) stated that they speak Russian at home, for ethnic Belarusians this share is 61.4%, for Russians — 97.2%, for Ukrainians — 89.0%, for Poles — 52.4%, and for Jews — 96.6%; 2,447,764 people (26.0% of the total population) stated that the language they usually speak at home
5244-476: The City Prosecutor’s Office’s illegal methods of investigation applied in this case. On 1 August 2003, The Leningrad District Military Court sentenced Mirilashvili to serve eight years in prison. Mirilashvili stated that the testimony of court expert Sergei Koval was an act of revenge and should be thrown out because of his personal interest in the case. Koval’s wife, Tatyana, was asked to resign at
5358-564: The Faculty of Philology at St Petersburg State University . Vyacheslav showed Durov the increasingly popular Facebook , after which the friends decided to create a new Russian social network. Lev Leviev , an Israeli classmate of Vyacheslav Mirilashivili, became the third co-founder. Vyacheslav Mirilashvili borrowed the money from his billionaire father and became the largest shareholder. Lev Leviev took over operational management, and Durov became CEO. Pavel Durov attracted his older brother Nikolai ,
5472-519: The Great and developed from the Moscow ( Middle or Central Russian ) dialect substratum under the influence of some of the previous century's Russian chancery language. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution , the spoken form of the Russian language was that of the nobility and the urban bourgeoisie. Russian peasants, the great majority of the population, continued to speak in their own dialects. However,
5586-578: The Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an optional acute accent ( знак ударения ) may, and sometimes should, be used to mark stress . For example, it is used to distinguish between otherwise identical words, especially when context does not make it obvious: замо́к ( zamók – "lock") – за́мок ( zámok – "castle"), сто́ящий ( stóyashchy – "worthwhile") – стоя́щий ( stoyáshchy – "standing"), чудно́ ( chudnó – "this
5700-650: The International Board of Trustees. After the fire crisis in the Carmel , Mirilashvili teamed up with Alexander Mashkevitch to create a fleet of fire-fighting vehicles, and in 2012 he provided the planes for a delegation of doctors and paramedics who rushed to aid the victims of terror in Burgas , Bulgaria. Mirilashvili serves as president of the World Jewish Congress - St. Petersburg, as well as vice president of
5814-515: The Middle East and North Africa – 1.3 million, Sub-Saharan Africa – 0.1 million, Latin America – 0.2 million, U.S., Canada , Australia, and New Zealand – 4.1 million speakers. Therefore, the Russian language is the seventh-largest in the world by the number of speakers , after English, Mandarin, Hindi -Urdu, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Portuguese. Russian is one of the six official languages of
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#17331070706205928-807: The Russian alphabet include ⟨ ѣ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ е ⟩ ( /je/ or /ʲe/ ); ⟨ і ⟩ and ⟨ ѵ ⟩ , which both merged to ⟨ и ⟩ ( /i/ ); ⟨ ѳ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ ф ⟩ ( /f/ ); ⟨ ѫ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ у ⟩ ( /u/ ); ⟨ ѭ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ ю ⟩ ( /ju/ or /ʲu/ ); and ⟨ ѧ ⟩ and ⟨ ѩ ⟩ , which later were graphically reshaped into ⟨ я ⟩ and merged phonetically to /ja/ or /ʲa/ . While these older letters have been abandoned at one time or another, they may be used in this and related articles. The yers ⟨ ъ ⟩ and ⟨ ь ⟩ originally indicated
6042-486: The Russian government intends to exclude foreign services from the public administration system. Officials were supposed to switch to "Automated workplace" from May 1, 2023. In June 2023, the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media announced a competition for software developers to "scale" the workspace and provide the necessary level of cryptographic protection. It is planned to spend 9 million rubles on
6156-458: The Russian principalities before and especially during Mongol rule. This strengthened dialectal differences, and for a while, prevented the emergence of a standardized national language. The formation of the unified and centralized Russian state in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the gradual re-emergence of a common political, economic, and cultural space created the need for a common standard language. The initial impulse for standardization came from
6270-454: The Soviet era can speak Russian, other generations of citizens that do not have any knowledge of Russian. Primary and secondary education by Russian is almost non-existent. In Uzbekistan , Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication. It has some official roles, being permitted in official documentation and is the lingua franca of the country and the language of the elite. Russian
6384-500: The Ukrainian people's right to information and freedom of expression." VK closed its office in Ukraine's capital Kyiv in June 2017. In December 2021, VKontakte's CEO, Boris Dobrodeev resigned from his post. Reuters linked Dobrodeev's resignation to the acquisition of VK's majority interest by two state-owned companies that happened the same month. According to one analyst, the state consolidation of VKontakte would cause greater censorship by
6498-460: The United Nations. Education in Russian is still a popular choice for both Russian as a second language (RSL) and native speakers in Russia, and in many former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics. In Belarus , Russian is a second state language alongside Belarusian per the Constitution of Belarus . 77% of
6612-456: The Video on Demand provider Ivi.ru that has secured licensing rights with all Hollywood majors in 2012. These partnerships allow providers to remove user-uploaded content from VK and substitute it with legal embedded copies from the provider's site. This legal content can be either ad-sponsored, subscription-based, or free, depending on the provider's choices. VK does not display its own advertising in
6726-497: The attack due to the site's use by children. VK tried to use XMLHttpRequest to solve this problem, but had forgotten about the same-origin policy . They succeeded in stopping the attack, though there were many ways to solve the problem with redirect. Durov was dismissed as CEO in April 2014 after he had failed to retract a letter of resignation. Durov contended that the resignation letter was an April fools prank. Durov then claimed Vladimir Putin's allies had, in effect, taken over
6840-514: The blacklist as the latest in a series of suspicious incidents to have happened to the website in recent months as a way for the Russian government to increase their stake in, and control of the site. On 18 November 2013, following an order from the Court of Rome , VK was blocked in Italy after a complaint from Medusa Film stating that it was hosting an illegal copy of one of its films. However, in April 2015,
6954-558: The board; at first, due to the fact the company confirmed he had resigned, it was believed to be related to the Russo-Ukrainian War which began in the previous February. However, Durov himself claimed it was an April Fool's Joke on 3 April 2014. On 21 April 2014, Durov was dismissed as CEO, claiming he failed to withdraw his letter of resignation a month earlier. Durov then claimed the company had been effectively taken over by Vladimir Putin 's political faction, suggesting his dismissal
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#17331070706207068-403: The broader sense of expanding the use of Russian alongside or in favour of other languages. The current standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language ( современный русский литературный язык – "sovremenny russky literaturny yazyk"). It arose at the beginning of the 18th century with the modernization reforms of the Russian state under the rule of Peter
7182-653: The cases against users are qualified as propaganda of extremism, xenophobia and Nazism. Statistically, among all the social networking services available in Russia, the users of VKontakte were targeted by police almost exclusively. By 2023, on the basis of VK, the “Automated workplace of a civil servant” (АРМ ГС in Russian) was developed, to which it is planned to transfer all Russian civil servants. AWP includes mail, calendar, cloud storage, instant messenger, supports audio and video calls. It should replace Telegram, WhatsApp, Gmail, Google Docs, Zoom and Skype widely used in Russia. Thus,
7296-480: The community app platform. The “Search for Lost Cats” (Russian: «Поиск пропавших котиков») app won the “Developers’ Choice” category. The prize pool for the event was 300 thousand rubles. The third VK Hackathon took place from 20 to 22 October 2017 with 320 participants competing in the event. The prize pool was one million rubles. An application designed to help users navigate the State Hermitage Museum won
7410-486: The company, and suggested his ousting was the result of his refusal to hand over personal details of users to the Russian Federal Security Service and his refusal to shut down a VK group dedicated to anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny . On 24 May 2013, it was reported in the media that the site had been mistakenly put on a list of websites banned by the Russian government. Some critics have accused
7524-400: The content at the beginning of 2015. At that time (November 2014), negotiations between major label companies and the social network VKontakte were ongoing. Because the social network is one of the most popular and visited sites in runet , its visits can be used to make DDoS attacks on smaller sites. VK performed DDOS attacks on certain sites, making users' browsers send multiple requests to
7638-460: The country. There is an Israeli TV channel mainly broadcasting in Russian with Israel Plus . See also Russian language in Israel . Russian is also spoken as a second language by a small number of people in Afghanistan . In Vietnam , Russian has been added in the elementary curriculum along with Chinese and Japanese and were named as "first foreign languages" for Vietnamese students to learn, on equal footing with English. The Russian language
7752-413: The factory and the industrial plant their local peasant dialects with their phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary, and the very process of recruiting workers from peasants and the mobility of the worker population generate another process: the liquidation of peasant inheritance by way of leveling the particulars of local dialects. On the ruins of peasant multilingual, in the context of developing heavy industry,
7866-402: The final reading amendments that state that all schools and kindergartens in the country are to transition to education in Latvian . From 2025, all children will be taught in Latvian only. On 28 September 2023, Latvian deputies approved The National Security Concept, according to which from 1 January 2026, all content created by Latvian public media (including LSM ) should be only in Latvian or
7980-405: The form of an online live stream. Any VK user could watch the broadcast live. After the ceremony, a private concert was held in the Vegas City Hall in Moscow. Tickets to the event could be won through a contest held in the VK Music community. VK Music Awards winners were determined by the number of plays an artist's song got on VK and the BOOM app. The names of the 30 award winners were published on
8094-435: The former Soviet Union . Russian has remained an official language of the Russian Federation , Belarus , Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan , and Tajikistan , and is still commonly used as a lingua franca in Ukraine , Moldova , the Caucasus , Central Asia , and to a lesser extent in the Baltic states and Israel . Russian has over 258 million total speakers worldwide. It is the most spoken native language in Europe ,
8208-462: The fourth VK Cup which took place from 8 to 9 July 2017. Teams from 52 countries applied to take part in the competition. The prize pool for the competition was 2.5 million rubles. The first VK Music Awards ceremony took place on 25 December 2017. The VK Music Awards were produced by Timur Bekmambetov and the Bazelevs Company with Pavel Volya hosting the event. The awards ceremony was held in
8322-547: The fourth most viewed site in Ukraine, but Facebook was twice as much visited. For 2019, VK appeared as the most visited social network in Ukraine according to Alexa. According to the Internet Association of Ukraine the share of Ukrainian Internet users who visit VK daily had fallen from 54% to 10% from September 2016 to September 2019. They also claimed in November 2019 that Facebook was the most popular social network. VK
8436-672: The generation of immigrants who started arriving in the early 1960s). Only about 25% of them are ethnic Russians, however. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union , the overwhelming majority of Russophones in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in New York City were Russian-speaking Jews. Afterward, the influx from the countries of the former Soviet Union changed the statistics somewhat, with ethnic Russians and Ukrainians immigrating along with some more Russian Jews and Central Asians. According to
8550-480: The government bureaucracy for the lack of a reliable tool of communication in administrative, legal, and judicial affairs became an obvious practical problem. The earliest attempts at standardizing Russian were made based on the so-called Moscow official or chancery language, during the 15th to 17th centuries. Since then, the trend of language policy in Russia has been standardization in both the restricted sense of reducing dialectical barriers between ethnic Russians, and
8664-522: The government. On 12 May 2022, in connection with the sanctions imposed by the European Union (EU), NEPLP decided to limit the activity of "VKontakte" ("vk.com"), "Odnoklassniki" ("ok.ru") and "Moy Mir" ("my.mail.ru") social medias in Latvia. The decision was made because NEPLP has evidence that the platforms are owned and controlled by Yury Kovalchuk and Vladimir Kiriyenko . The mentioned persons are subject to EU sanctions in connection with undermining
8778-442: The grant include “University Schedules” (Russian: «Расписание вузов»), a scheduling app, LiveCamDroid, a mobile streaming service, HTML Academy, an educational project, and others. VK re-launched the project in 2017. Only active projects with an earnings model could submit applications. 327 grant applications were received but only 67 of them passed the initial screening. The total prize pool was 2.5 million rubles. The first VK Cup,
8892-414: The most spoken Slavic language , as well as the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia . It is the world's seventh-most spoken language by number of native speakers , and the world's ninth-most spoken language by total number of speakers . Russian is one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station , one of the six official languages of the United Nations , as well as
9006-516: The northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region . Russian was also the main foreign language taught in school in China between 1949 and 1964. In Kazakhstan , Russian is not a state language, but according to article 7 of the Constitution of Kazakhstan its usage enjoys equal status to that of the Kazakh language in state and local administration. The 2009 census reported that 10,309,500 people, or 84.8% of
9120-525: The official VK Music Awards community page and on the BOOM app website. “Rosé Wine” ( Allj and Feduk ), “Lambada” ( T-Fest [ ru ] and Scriptonite ), and “My Half” ( MiyaGi and Endspiel [ ru ] ) topped the list of most listened to songs. The official pages of all award winners have been marked with a special symbol. Since 2015, VK has held a yearly 2-day open-air music and entertainment festival. This festival traditionally takes place on
9234-515: The other hand, before the war, almost a quarter of Ukrainians were in favour of granting Russian the status of the state language, while after the beginning of Russia's invasion the support for the idea dropped to just 7%. In peacetime, the idea of raising the status of Russian was traditionally supported by residents of the south and east . But even in these regions, only a third of the respondents were in favour, and after Russia's full-scale invasion , their number dropped by almost half. According to
9348-455: The other three languages in the East Slavic branch. In many places in eastern and southern Ukraine and throughout Belarus, these languages are spoken interchangeably, and in certain areas traditional bilingualism resulted in language mixtures such as Surzhyk in eastern Ukraine and Trasianka in Belarus. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect , although it vanished during the 15th or 16th century,
9462-446: The parliament approved a bill to close up all Russian language schools and kindergartens by the school year. The transition to only Estonian language schools and kindergartens will start in the 2024-2025 school year. In Latvia , Russian is officially considered a foreign language. 55% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 26% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On 18 February 2012, Latvia held
9576-453: The peasants' speech was never systematically studied, as it was generally regarded by philologists as simply a source of folklore and an object of curiosity. This was acknowledged by the noted Russian dialectologist Nikolai Karinsky , who toward the end of his life wrote: "Scholars of Russian dialects mostly studied phonetics and morphology. Some scholars and collectors compiled local dictionaries. We have almost no studies of lexical material or
9690-455: The population aged 15 and above, could read and write well in Russian, and understand the spoken language. In October 2023, Kazakhstan drafted a media law aimed at increasing the use of the Kazakh language over Russian, the law stipulates that the share of the state language on television and radio should increase from 50% to 70%, at a rate of 5% per year, starting in 2025. In Kyrgyzstan , Russian
9804-418: The population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 67% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. According to the 2019 Belarusian census , out of 9,413,446 inhabitants of the country, 5,094,928 (54.1% of the total population) named Belarusian as their native language, with 61.2% of ethnic Belarusians and 54.5% of ethnic Poles declaring Belarusian as their native language. In everyday life in
9918-426: The project. VK organized their first 24-hour Hackathon in 2015 from 31 October to 1 November. The participants were invited to develop projects united by a common idea: “Make it Simple!” (Russian: «Упрощайте!»). 34 teams took part in the competition. A prize pool of 300 thousand rubles was split among the winners. The second VK Hackathon took place from 26 to 27 November 2016. The participants developed projects for
10032-475: The pronunciation of ultra-short or reduced /ŭ/ , /ĭ/ . Because of many technical restrictions in computing and also because of the unavailability of Cyrillic keyboards abroad, Russian is often transliterated using the Latin alphabet. For example, мороз ('frost') is transliterated moroz , and мышь ('mouse'), mysh or myš' . Once commonly used by the majority of those living outside Russia, transliteration
10146-466: The proper pronunciation of uncommon words or names. Russian is an East Slavic language of the wider Indo-European family . It is a descendant of Old East Slavic , a language used in Kievan Rus' , which was a loose conglomerate of East Slavic tribes from the late 9th to the mid-13th centuries. From the point of view of spoken language , its closest relatives are Ukrainian , Belarusian , and Rusyn ,
10260-802: The removal of the VK application from the App Store. CEO Vladimir Kiriyenko was sanctioned by the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, European Union, Japan, Australia and various countries. In July 2012, VKontakte was accused of close cooperation with the Centre for Combating Extremism (Centre E) , a unit within the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs heavily criticized for repressing opposition activists. For publications, reposts, comments and likes posted on their VKontakte pages, dozens of Russian citizens were sentenced to fines, suspended sentences and imprisonment. Most of
10374-491: The respondents), while according to the 2002 census – 142.6 million people (99.2% of the respondents). In Ukraine , Russian is a significant minority language. According to estimates from Demoskop Weekly, in 2004 there were 14,400,000 native speakers of Russian in the country, and 29 million active speakers. 65% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 38% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On 5 September 2017, Ukraine's Parliament passed
10488-587: The same day, Durov deleted the pages of the first co-investors, stopped contacting them, and soon announced that VKontakte would postpone its IPO indefinitely. On 29 May 2012, Mail.ru Group announced its decision to yield control of the company to Durov by offering him the voting rights on its shares. Combined with Durov's personal 12% stake, this gave him 52% of the votes. In April 2013, the Mirilashvili family sold its 40% share in VK to United Capital Partners for $ 1.12 billion, while Lev Leviev sold his 8% share in
10602-543: The same deal, giving United Capital Partners 48% ownership. In January 2014, VK's founder Pavel Durov sold his 12% stake in the company to Ivan Tavrin , the CEO of MegaFon , which is controlled by Alisher Usmanov . Following the deal, Usmanov and his allies controlled around 52% of the company. Shortly thereafter, the CEO of Megafon, sold his 12% stake to Mail.ru, thus allowing Mail.ru to consolidate its controlling stake of 52% in VK. On 1 April 2014, Durov submitted his resignation to
10716-739: The same month, the site was subjected to a severe DDoS attack, which briefly put it offline. The user base reached 1 million in July 2007, and 10 million in April 2008. In December 2008 VK overtook rival Odnoklassniki as Russia's most popular social networking service. Similar to many social networks, the platform's fundamental features revolve around private messaging, sharing photos, posting status updates, and exchanging links with friends. VK also provides tools for administering online communities and managing celebrity pages. The site allows its users to upload, search and stream media content, such as videos and music. VK features an advanced search engine, that allows complex queries for finding friends, as well as
10830-508: The site was reopened for Italian users and its mobile app is available on both the App Store and Google Play . In January 2016, China banned VKontakte, claiming that it was manipulating web content and cooperating with the Kremlin. According to Russia's media watchdog , the network estimates around 300,000 users based in China. As of 14 February 2018, China authorities unblocked VKontakte and it
10944-459: The site's music or video sections, nor in the videos themselves. In October 2013, VKontakte was cleared of copyright infringement charges by a court in Saint Petersburg . The judge ruled that the social network is not responsible for the content uploaded by its users. In November 2014, the head of the Roskomnadzor , Maxim Ksenzov , said that VKontakte would complete the process of legalization of
11058-489: The summer of 2011, Mirilashvili and Leviev were ready to accept in payment owned by Mail.ru Group shares of Facebook, Groupon , and Zynga , but the deal failed due to Durov's unwillingness to sell a stake on MRG terms. Later, the co-founders considered VKontakte's IPO as an alternative. In March 2012, Durov "accidentally" became plugged into the negotiations where Mirilashvili and Leviev discussed selling their stakes directly to Mail.ru Group's main investor, Alisher Usmanov . On
11172-626: The survey carried out by RATING in August 2023 in the territory controlled by Ukraine and among the refugees, almost 60% of the polled usually speak Ukrainian at home, about 30% – Ukrainian and Russian, only 9% – Russian. Since March 2022, the use of Russian in everyday life has been noticeably decreasing. For 82% of respondents, Ukrainian is their mother tongue, and for 16%, Russian is their mother tongue. IDPs and refugees living abroad are more likely to use both languages for communication or speak Russian. Nevertheless, more than 70% of IDPs and refugees consider Ukrainian to be their native language. In
11286-459: The syntax of Russian dialects." After 1917, Marxist linguists had no interest in the multiplicity of peasant dialects and regarded their language as a relic of the rapidly disappearing past that was not worthy of scholarly attention. Nakhimovsky quotes the Soviet academicians A.M Ivanov and L.P Yakubinsky, writing in 1930: The language of peasants has a motley diversity inherited from feudalism. On its way to becoming proletariat peasantry brings to
11400-541: The target site without their consent. The targets were the Runet Prize voting page in 2008 and the CAPTCHA -solving service antigate.com in 2012. It was done by inserting an iframe and a piece of JavaScript code which periodically reloaded the iframe. As a countermeasure, antigate was detecting whether iframe was loaded from VK and if it were antigate had redirected request to xHamster , a pornography website . VK needed to cease
11514-458: The territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine. After Russian military invasion of Ukraine , on 26 September 2022, the VK application (as well as other applications of the holding services) was removed from the Apple App Store due to international sanctions . On 28 September, the Russian communications regulator Roskomnadzor issued a statement demanding an explanation for
11628-770: The two. Others divide the language into three groupings, Northern , Central (or Middle), and Southern , with Moscow lying in the Central region. The Northern Russian dialects and those spoken along the Volga River typically pronounce unstressed /o/ clearly, a phenomenon called okanye ( оканье ). Besides the absence of vowel reduction, some dialects have high or diphthongal /e⁓i̯ɛ/ in place of Proto-Slavic * ě and /o⁓u̯ɔ/ in stressed closed syllables (as in Ukrainian) instead of Standard Russian /e/ and /o/ , respectively. Another Northern dialectal morphological feature
11742-506: The use of the language has some presence in certain areas. A large part of the population, especially the older generations, can speak Russian as a foreign language. However, English has replaced Russian as lingua franca in Lithuania and around 80% of young people speak English as their first foreign language. In contrast to the other two Baltic states, Lithuania has a relatively small Russian-speaking minority (5.0% as of 2008). According to
11856-470: The “Culture” category. In 2011, Pavel Durov and Yuri Milner created Start Fellows, a grant program founded to support projects in the field of technology. In 2014, VK took over the Start Fellows program and made it more systematic. The grant was provided to 3 companies each month and included project consultation from VK along with 25 thousand rubles a month for advertisement on the VK platform. Winners of
11970-440: Was established by his father, Moshe Mikhael. By the mid-90s, Mirilashvili's family had developed several real estate businesses across Russia, and expanded them beyond the borders of the commonwealth. Mikhael Mirilashvili serves as the president of Petromir, a Russian holdings company, as well as director of Lukoil North West Petroleum. He also owns a television channel and numerous malls and commercial centers in St. Petersburg. In
12084-521: Was expected to gain most of the users lost by Facebook and Instagram after they were blocked in Russia in 2022, according to a Calltouch poll. Initially, founder and CEO Pavel Durov owned 20% of shares (although he had majority voting power through proxy votes), and a trio of Russian-Israeli investors Yitzchak Mirilashvili , his father Mikhael Mirilashvili , and Lev Leviev owned 60%, 10%, and 10% respectively. In 2007, Digital Sky Technologies, an investment company managed by Yuri Milner , acquired
12198-405: Was first introduced in North America when Russian explorers voyaged into Alaska and claimed it for Russia during the 18th century. Although most Russian colonists left after the United States bought the land in 1867, a handful stayed and preserved the Russian language in this region to this day, although only a few elderly speakers of this unique dialect are left. In Nikolaevsk, Alaska , Russian
12312-421: Was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 19% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. According to the 2014 Moldovan census , Russians accounted for 4.1% of Moldova's population, 9.4% of the population declared Russian as their native language, and 14.5% said they usually spoke Russian. According to the 2010 census in Russia , Russian language skills were indicated by 138 million people (99.4% of
12426-486: Was fully accessible in the country. In May 2017, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a decree to impose a ban on Mail.ru and its widely used social networks including VKontakte and Odnoklassniki as part of its continued sanctions on Russia for its annexation of Crimea and involvement in the war in Donbas . Reporters Without Borders condemned the ban, calling it a "disproportionate measure that seriously undermines
12540-436: Was returned safely. Two weeks later, the dead bodies of those responsible for the kidnapping, along with their girlfriends and driver, were found near Isaakievskiy (Saint Isaac's) Square . Russian authorities arrested Mikhael Mirilashvili (the son) and charged him with kidnapping in March 2001. According to the case details, Mirilashvili ordered the security service to find mafia members who had abducted his family, and as
12654-507: Was settled by the Russian High Arbitration Court in favour of the social network. The court ruled that VK is not responsible for its users’ copyright violations, taking into account that both parties agreed with the technical possibility to identify the user who posted illegal content and who, consequently, must incur the liability. Another ruling early in 2012 went partially in favor of Gala Records (now Warner Music Russia) ,
12768-469: Was the result of both his refusal to hand over personal details of users to federal law enforcement and his refusal to hand over the personal details of people who were members of a VKontakte group dedicated to the Euromaidan protest movement. Durov then left Russia and stated that he had "no plans to go back" and that "the country is incompatible with Internet business at the moment". On 16 September 2014,
12882-571: Was the sixth most popular website in Russia. The network was also popular in Ukraine until it was banned by the Verkhovna Rada in 2017. According to Semrush , in 2024 VK is the 30th most visited website in the world . VKontakte was conceived in 2006 when Pavel Durov , creator of the popular student forum spbgu.ru , met his former classmate Vyacheslav Mirilashvili in St. Petersburg after graduating from
12996-402: Was the sixth-most used language on the top 1,000 sites, behind English, Chinese, French, German, and Japanese. 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
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