Interesting facts about Russian: The Russian language is the 5th most spoken language. Russian is the mother tongue for 147 million people, and another 113 million speak it as a second language. In terms of the prevalence (number of native speakers), Russian is the fifth language in the world (after English, Chinese, Spanish and Arabic). A huge number of Russian immigrants throughout the world speak Russian. And, there are many countries where people speak Russian. For example, Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and so on.