The Cyrillic alphabet and the languages that use it. (Nothing to do with an international chain of toy megastores.)
Belarusian
In Belarus, Russian is the native language. Belarussian is now mostly associated with poor farmers and the like.
Bulgarian
Bulgaria was a member of the
Warsaw Pact during the
Cold War, but is now a member of
NATO and the
European Union (as are the rest of the "buffer states").
Moldovian
Romanian with a new (or archaic, depending on who you ask) orthography imposed to justify a Soviet landgrab after the
Great Patriotic War. Post-Soviet Moldova uses the Latin alphabet, but it has one minor orthographic difference with standard Romanian across the border.
Russian
There is not just one Russian accent (dialects would be the better word), but two or three:
- Northern Russian
- Southern Russian- identifiable by "griba" (mushroom) being pronounced "hriba". The accent of Mikhail Gorbachev.
- Moscow/St. Petersburg- "Standard" Russian.
Serbian
The language of the country that is the successor state to the former Yugoslavia and which appears to be about to lose yet more territory to the new Kosovo/Kosova. The language was former collected together with Croatian and Bosnian (which use the Latin alphabet) as Serbo-Croat, but are now separated by linguists.
It has a few extra characters, such as "J".
Due to the fact that Serbians played a major part in the horrors of the Balkans Wars, Serbia is a common place from which to source villains and therefore the language comes with it.
One of the more notable instances of the use of the Serbian language in fiction is the revelation of Nina Myers as
The Mole in
24. Nina uses Serbian (to delay the revelation a few seconds longer) in her conversation with Victor Drazen (the Serbian spelling is Viktor). The on-screen subtitles have her stating "It's Yelena", her
Code Name. Serbians would spell it "Jelena", as in the tennis player Jelena Janković. The writers probably didn't want the American audience thinking it sounded like "Gel-an-ah".
Speaking of Viktor Dražen and his family, their names are a case of
Did Not Do The Research since Dražen is a first name, not a family name; his wife Elena should be Jelena; Andre should be Andrej and Alexis should be Aleksej, and those two names would even so only be used if the parents were huge fans of Russian literature.
Ukrainian
Ukrainian is very similar to Russian and people from the different countries can have conversation easily, but there are differences. Ukrainian has a distinct accent (similar to that of Southern Russian), which is sadly a source of jokes for some Russians.
Not everyone in Ukraine speaks Ukrainian at home, although nearly everyone knows it. The rough division is a line running through Kyiv/Kiev and very closely matches the voting patterns in the 2004 Presidential Election (with Ukrainian users tending to vote for Yushchenko and Russian users for Yanukovych).
In addition to these, there are several languages in Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union that wound up with a Cyrillic orthography because they did not have an alphabet (much like almost all Native American languages have a Latin orthography). Several other nationalities in Russia and the former Soviet Republics (Azeris, Kazakhs, Tajiks, Turkmens, Tatars, Chechens, etc.) had preexisting (usually Perso-Arabic) orthographies replaces with Cyrillic ones during the Soviet era, although most of them outside Russia are phasing them out.
Please note that Czech, Slovak, Polish, Lithuanian, and a lot of other Slavic and other Eastern European languages do NOT use Cyrillic alphabet, and sometimes even assuming that they can read it could be offensive.
Andrey or Andrei- Transliteration Issues
Because not all the letters directly translate into English sounds, you get various approaches to Cyrillic-Latin transliteration. This is why you get the Project 955 missile submarines either spelt "Borey" or "Borei" in English.
There are a number of different systems, such as that used by the Library of Congress.
You will sometimes get the words, in either alphabet given those little line accents called "udareniye". These aren't actually used in writing, they're just pronunciation aids.
