About Russian Language
According to Wikipedia.org, Russian is a popular East Slavic language. It is widely spoken in Russia and Eastern Europe. This is a part of the Indo-European language family and is among the four living East Slavic languages. Russian is the official language of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. Interestingly widely spoken in Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and many other Baltic states. Russian is spoken by over 258 million speakers all over the world. It is written in the Cyrillic script. You can easily distinguish between consonant phonemes with palatal articulation. It has a combination of soft and hard sounds. This distinction is a prominent feature of Russian. Another aspect is the reduction of vowels that are not stressed. Some homographic words include замо́к (zamók – a 'lock') and за́мок (zámok – a 'castle'). You may not be able to indicate the pronunciation of uncommon words.
About Icelandic Language
According to Wikipedia.org, Icelandic is the official North Germanic language. It is spoken by over 314,000 people in the world. Most of the native speakers are living in Iceland where it is considered the national language. However, this language is a little more conservative as compared to other German languages. This language features western Norwegian dialects. Even the four cases synthetic grammar is also unique. Surprisingly, the written form of this language is not changed much since the 13 century. Icelandic is also quite similar to Faroese especially the written form. It remains distinctive when compared with English and German. Apart from the native speakers in Iceland, this language is also popular in Denmark. Icelandic is spoken by 8000 people in Denmark and around 1400 in Canada.
