- Russian is the official national language and is unsurprisingly the most common language spoken by Russian citizens. Russian is the most widely-spoken Slavic language in the world, and originated from a combination of Old East Slavic and Germanic languages that were spoken locally in the then-called Kievan Rus' nation.
- English is also widely spoken in Russia. The 2002 Russian Census found that almost 7 million Russians spoke English, making English the second-most known language in Russia after Russian.
- Tatarian, a Turkish language spoken by over 5 million Russians, is the third most common language of Russia. Most Tatarian-speaking residents are Turkish migrant workers,
- The fourth most common language spoken in Russia is German, which has nearly 3 million speakers.
- Though they don't have nearly as many speakers as the top four languages, Ukrainian, Bashkirian, Chechen, Chuvashian, and Armenian all have over 500,000 speakers each.