The Russian language belongs to the Indo-European family, along with other East Slavic languages, Belarusian and Ukrainian. The rather young Russian language derives from a common predecessor: Common Slavic, which was divided when the Slavic people immigrated around the 5th century AD. The brothers Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius, in 863 AD were sent to Moravia (present-day Czech Republic) to translate the Gospel into Slavic. This script was later known as the Glagolitic script. The ancient Cyrillic alphabet had 44 letters, including Greek numbers, was adopted by the Eastern Slavs; it became the script used by the Russians. Peter the Great reformed the alphabet in 1708-1710, and it was reformed again in 1918, eliminating redundant letters to 33 letters (Kornev, Rahklin and Grigorenko 43). The Russian language influences the culture of many Russians, including the 120,000,000 Russian speakers living outside of Russia and the Russian people who still live in the territory covering 1/9 of the earth's land mass (Kornev, Rahklin, and Grigorenko 42). The Russian language is unique in its use of the Cyrillic script, which has many different aspects, making it more difficult for young people to learn it. There are hard and soft letters that can completely change the meaning of a word, jotated vowels and regular vowels. Syllables in the Russian language are difficult to master, unless a child is a native; he/she will possess rhyme segmentation to help the child decipher the segmented words (Kornev, Rahklin, and Grigorenko 43). Culture can be defined simply as R. Brislin says: “Culture relates those aspects of society in which all its members participate and which all possess and pass on to the next generation” (Leontiev 51). The Russian...... at the center of the newspaper......4.Politis Virk Karen and Faiz Kermani. “Language and culture in global experiments”. Applied clinical trials Vol.20. No.6. (2011): 72-9. ProQuest. Network. February 25, 2014.Prewitt-Freilino, Jennifer L., Andrew T. Caswell, and Emmi K. Laasko. “The Gender of a Language: A Comparison of Gender Equality in Countries with Gendered, Naturally Gendered, and Genderless Languages” Sex Roles 66.3-4. (2012):268-281. ProQuest. Network. February 25, 2014Wierzbicka, Anna. “Russian emotional expression”. Ethos vol. 26. N.4.(1998):456-483 JSTOR. Network. 19 February 2014.- - -.“Russian cultural writings: the theory of cultural writings and its applications”. Ethos Vol.30. No.4. (2003):4012-432. JSTOR. Network. February 19, 2014.Zhao, Wen. "An analysis of social proverbs from the perspective of cultural semiotics". Theory and Practice in Language Studies 2.10 (2012): 2073-80. ProQuest. Network. February 25. 2014.