
Languages closest to Russian
Russian is the most-widely spoken Slavic language with over 250 million speakers. It belongs to the eastern group of Slavic languages along with Belorussian and Ukrainian. Both these languages could be considered closest to Russian (although, when I hear Belorussian, it sounds to me as being more similar to Russian than Ukrainian). All three eastern Slavic languages are written in Cyrillic script. The other two groups of Slavic languages are western and southern. Bulgarian, M