sentence-transformers/squad huggingface dataset:
Passage: Russian distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called soft and hard sounds. This distinction is found between pairs of almost all consonants and is one of the most distinguishing features of the language. Another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels. Stress, which is unpredictable, is not normally indicated orthographically though an optional acute accent (знак ударения, znak udareniya) may be used to mark stress, such as to distinguish between homographic words, for example замо́к (zamok, meaning a lock) and за́мок (zamok, meaning a castle), or to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words or names.

Question: What kind of phonemes are soft sounds?

Question: What kind of accent can mark stress?

Question: What kind of words can acute accents distinguish?

Question: What word means both lock and castle, depending on its accent?
Passage: Russian is a Slavic language of the Indo-European family. It is a lineal descendant of the language used in Kievan Rus'. From the point of view of the spoken language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn, the other three languages in the East Slavic group. In many places in eastern and southern Ukraine and throughout Belarus, these languages are spoken interchangeably, and in certain areas traditional bilingualism resulted in language mixtures, e.g. Surzhyk in eastern Ukraine and Trasianka in Belarus. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect, although vanished during the 15th or 16th century, is sometimes considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. Also Russian has notable lexical similarities with Bulgarian due to a common Church Slavonic influence on both languages, as well as because of later interaction in the 19th–20th centuries, although Bulgarian grammar differs markedly from Russian. In the 19th century, the language was often called "Great Russian" to distinguish it from Belarusian, then called "White Russian" and Ukrainian, then called "Little Russian".

Question: What language does Russian descend from?

Question: What are Russian's closest relatives?

Question: Where is Surzhyk used?

Question: Where is Trasianka used?

Question: What was 'Little Russian'?
Passage: The vocabulary (mainly abstract and literary words), principles of word formations, and, to some extent, inflections and literary style of Russian have been also influenced by Church Slavonic, a developed and partly russified form of the South Slavic Old Church Slavonic language used by the Russian Orthodox Church. However, the East Slavic forms have tended to be used exclusively in the various dialects that are experiencing a rapid decline. In some cases, both the East Slavic and the Church Slavonic forms are in use, with many different meanings. For details, see Russian phonology and History of the Russian language.

Question: What language does the Russian Orthodox Church use?

Question: What kind of words in Russian have been influenced by Church Slavonic?

Question: What word forms are used together in some cases?
Passage: Until the 20th century, the language's spoken form was the language of only the upper noble classes and urban population, as Russian peasants from the countryside continued to speak in their own dialects. By the mid-20th century, such dialects were forced out with the introduction of the compulsory education system that was established by the Soviet government. Despite the formalization of Standard Russian, some nonstandard dialectal features (such as fricative [ɣ] in Southern Russian dialects) are still observed in colloquial speech.

Question: When did Russian language spread to the peasants?

Question: Who spoke Russian before the 20th century?

Question: When did the Soviets establish required education?

Question: What nonstandard feature does Southern Russian use?
Passage: Ethnic Russians constitute 25.5% of the country's current population and 58.6% of the native Estonian population is also able to speak Russian. In all, 67.8% of Estonia's population can speak Russian. Command of Russian language, however, is rapidly decreasing among younger Estonians (primarily being replaced by the command of English). For example, if 53% of ethnic Estonians between 15 and 19 claim to speak some Russian, then among the 10- to 14-year-old group, command of Russian has fallen to 19% (which is about one-third the percentage of those who claim to have command of English in the same age group).

Question: How much of Estonia is ethnic Russians?

Question: How much of Estonia speaks Russian?

Question: What is the ratio of young Estonians who speak Russian relative to those who speak English?

Question: How much of Estonia's native Estonians speaks Russian?
Passage: As the Grand Duchy of Finland was part of the Russian Empire from 1809 to 1918, a number of Russian speakers have remained in Finland. There are 33,400 Russian-speaking Finns, amounting to 0.6% of the population. Five thousand (0.1%) of them are late 19th century and 20th century immigrants or their descendants, and the remaining majority are recent immigrants who moved there in the 1990s and later.[citation needed] Russian is spoken by 1.4% of the population of Finland according to a 2014 estimate from the World Factbook.

Question: When did Finland join the Russian Empire?

Question: When did Finland leave the Russian Empire?

Question: What percent of Finns speak Russian?

Question: How many Finns speak Russian?

Question: How many Russian-speaking Finns are descended from early immigrants?
Passage: In Ukraine, Russian is seen as a language of inter-ethnic communication, and a minority language, under the 1996 Constitution of Ukraine. According to estimates from Demoskop Weekly, in 2004 there were 14,400,000 native speakers of Russian in the country, and 29 million active speakers. 65% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 38% used it as the main language with family, friends or at work. Russian is spoken by 29.6% of the population according to a 2001 estimate from the World Factbook. 20% of school students receive their education primarily in Russian.

Question: How many Ukrainians speak Russian natively as of 2004?

Question: How many Ukrainians speak Russian actively as of 2004?

Question: What percent of Ukraine is fluent in Russian as of 2006?

Question: What percent of Ukraine use Russian as their main language as of 2006?

Question: What is Russian's legal status in Ukraine?
Passage: In the 20th century, Russian was mandatorily taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other countries that used to be satellites of the USSR. In particular, these countries include Poland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Albania, former East Germany and Cuba. However, younger generations are usually not fluent in it, because Russian is no longer mandatory in the school system. According to the Eurobarometer 2005 survey, though, fluency in Russian remains fairly high (20–40%) in some countries, in particular those where the people speak a Slavic language and thereby have an edge in learning Russian (namely, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Bulgaria).

Question: What pact contained many Russian-speaking countries?

Question: Where was Russian schooling mandatory in the 20th century?

Question: Which countries speak other Slavic languages?
Passage: Significant Russian-speaking groups also exist in Western Europe. These have been fed by several waves of immigrants since the beginning of the 20th century, each with its own flavor of language. The United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Brazil, Norway, and Austria have significant Russian-speaking communities. According to the 2011 Census of Ireland, there were 21,639 people in the nation who use Russian as a home language. However, of this only 13% were Russian nationals. 20% held Irish citizenship, while 27% and 14% were holding the passports of Latvia and Lithuania respectively.

Question: In which European countries do many Russian immigrants live?

Question: How much of Ireland's Russian speakers are Russian citizens?

Question: How many people in Ireland speak Russian?

Question: How much of Ireland's Russian speakers are Irish citizens?

Question: How much of Ireland's Russian speakers are Latvian citizens?
Passage: In Armenia Russian has no official status, but it's recognised as a minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. According to estimates from Demoskop Weekly, in 2004 there were 15,000 native speakers of Russian in the country, and 1 million active speakers. 30% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 2% used it as the main language with family, friends or at work. Russian is spoken by 1.4% of the population according to a 2009 estimate from the World Factbook.

Question: What convention recognizes Russian in Armenia?

Question: How many Armenians speak Russian natively?

Question: How many Armenians speak Russian actively?

Question: What percent of Armenia speaks Russian?

Question: What percent of Armenia uses Russian as their main language?
Passage: In Georgia Russian has no official status, but it's recognised as a minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. According to estimates from Demoskop Weekly, in 2004 there were 130,000 native speakers of Russian in the country, and 1.7 million active speakers. 27% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 1% used it as the main language with family, friends or at work. Russian is the language of 9% of the population according to the World Factook. Ethnologue cites Russian as the country's de facto working language.

Question: How many Georgians speak Russian actively?

Question: What convention recognizes Russian in Georgia?

Question: How many Georgians speak Russian natively?

Question: What percent of Georgia is fluent in Russian?

Question: What percent of Georgia use Russian as their main language?
Passage: In Kazakhstan Russian is not a state language, but according to article 7 of the Constitution of Kazakhstan its usage enjoys equal status to that of the Kazakh language in state and local administration. According to estimates from Demoskop Weekly, in 2004 there were 4,200,000 native speakers of Russian in the country, and 10 million active speakers. 63% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 46% used it as the main language with family, friends or at work. According to a 2001 estimate from the World Factbook, 95% of the population can speak Russian. Large Russian-speaking communities still exist in northern Kazakhstan, and ethnic Russians comprise 25.6% of Kazakhstan's population. The 2009 census reported that 10,309,500 people, or 84.8% of the population aged 15 and above, could read and write well in Russian, as well as understand the spoken language.

Question: What is the legal status of Russian in Kazakhstan?

Question: What percent of people in Kazakhstan speak Russian fluently?

Question: How many people in Kazakhstan speak Russian natively?

Question: How many people in Kazakhstan speak Russian actively?

Question: What percent of people in Kazakhstan use Russian as their main language?
Passage: The language was first introduced in North America when Russian explorers voyaged into Alaska and claimed it for Russia during the 1700s. Although most colonists left after the United States bought the land in 1867, a handful stayed and preserved the Russian language in this region to this day, although only a few elderly speakers of this unique dialect are left. Sizable Russian-speaking communities also exist in North America, especially in large urban centers of the U.S. and Canada, such as New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, Nashville, San Francisco, Seattle, Spokane, Toronto, Baltimore, Miami, Chicago, Denver and Cleveland. In a number of locations they issue their own newspapers, and live in ethnic enclaves (especially the generation of immigrants who started arriving in the early 1960s). Only about 25% of them are ethnic Russians, however. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the overwhelming majority of Russophones in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in New York City were Russian-speaking Jews. Afterward, the influx from the countries of the former Soviet Union changed the statistics somewhat, with ethnic Russians and Ukrainians immigrating along with some more Russian Jews and Central Asians. According to the United States Census, in 2007 Russian was the primary language spoken in the homes of over 850,000 individuals living in the United States.

Question: Where did Russian explorers first reach North America?

Question: When did Russian explorers first reach North America?

Question: When did the US buy Alaska?

Question: What portion of Russian-speaking Americans are ethnic Russians?

Question: What is the term for Russian-speaking people?
Passage: Russian is one of the official languages (or has similar status and interpretation must be provided into Russian) of the United Nations, International Atomic Energy Agency, World Health Organization, International Civil Aviation Organization, UNESCO, World Intellectual Property Organization, International Telecommunication Union, World Meteorological Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization, International Fund for Agricultural Development, International Criminal Court, International Monetary Fund, International Olympic Committee, Universal Postal Union, World Bank, Commonwealth of Independent States, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, Eurasian Economic Community, Collective Security Treaty Organization, Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, International Organization for Standardization, GUAM Organization for Democracy and Economic Development, International Mathematical Olympiad. The Russian language is also one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station - NASA astronauts who serve alongside Russian cosmonauts usually take Russian language courses. This practice goes back to the Apollo-Soyuz mission, which first flew in 1975.

Question: When did Apollo-Soyuz fly?

Question: For which mission did NASA astronauts first learn Russian?

Question: What math competition has Russian as an official language?

Question: What are Russian astronauts called?
Passage: In March 2013 it was announced that Russian is now the second-most used language on the Internet after English. People use the Russian language on 5.9% of all websites, slightly ahead of German and far behind English (54.7%). Russian is used not only on 89.8% of .ru sites, but also on 88.7% of sites with the former Soviet Union domain .su. The websites of former Soviet Union nations also use high levels of Russian: 79.0% in Ukraine, 86.9% in Belarus, 84.0% in Kazakhstan, 79.6% in Uzbekistan, 75.9% in Kyrgyzstan and 81.8% in Tajikistan. However, Russian is the sixth-most used language on the top 1,000 sites, behind English, Chinese, French, German and Japanese.

Question: What is the second-most-popular language online as of 2013?

Question: What percent of all websites are in English?

Question: What percent of all websites are in Russian?

Question: What percent of all .ru websites are in Russian?

Question: What percent of Ukraine's websites are in Russian?
Passage: Despite leveling after 1900, especially in matters of vocabulary and phonetics, a number of dialects still exist in Russia. Some linguists divide the dialects of Russian into two primary regional groupings, "Northern" and "Southern", with Moscow lying on the zone of transition between the two. Others divide the language into three groupings, Northern, Central (or Middle) and Southern, with Moscow lying in the Central region. All dialects also divided in two main chronological categories: the dialects of primary formation (the territory of the Eastern Rus' or Muscovy, roughly consists of the modern Central and Northwestern Federal districts); and secondary formation (other territory). Dialectology within Russia recognizes dozens of smaller-scale variants. The dialects often show distinct and non-standard features of pronunciation and intonation, vocabulary and grammar. Some of these are relics of ancient usage now completely discarded by the standard language.

Question: What two regions do some linguists divide Russian into?

Question: What three regions do some linguists divide Russian into?

Question: What distinguishes Russian dialects?
Passage: The Northern Russian dialects and those spoken along the Volga River typically pronounce unstressed /o/ clearly (the phenomenon called okanye/оканье). Besides the absence of vowel reduction, some dialects have high or diphthongal /e~i̯ɛ/ in the place of Proto-Slavic *ě and /o~u̯ɔ/ in stressed closed syllables (as in Ukrainian) instead of Standard Russian /e/ and /o/. An interesting morphological feature is a post-posed definite article -to, -ta, -te similarly to that existing in Bulgarian and Macedonian.

Question: What is okanye?

Question: What articles are similar to Bulgarian?

Question: What do some Russian dialects do about vowels?

Question: What region of dialects is the Volga River area in?
Passage: In the Southern Russian dialects, instances of unstressed /e/ and /a/ following palatalized consonants and preceding a stressed syllable are not reduced to [ɪ] (as occurs in the Moscow dialect), being instead pronounced [a] in such positions (e.g. несли is pronounced [nʲaˈslʲi], not [nʲɪsˈlʲi]) – this is called yakanye/яканье. Consonants include a fricative /ɣ/, a semivowel /w~u̯/ and /x~xv~xw/, whereas the Standard and Northern dialects have the consonants /ɡ/, /v/, and final /l/ and /f/, respectively. The morphology features a palatalized final /tʲ/ in 3rd person forms of verbs (this is unpalatalized in the Standard and Northern dialects). Some of these features such as akanye/yakanye, a debuccalized or lenited /ɡ/, a semivowel /w~u̯/ and palatalized final /tʲ/ in 3rd person forms of verbs are also present in modern Belarusian and some dialects of Ukrainian (Eastern Polesian), indicating a linguistic continuum.

Question: What is pronounced [ɪ] in Moscow's dialect?

Question: What is pronounced [a] in Southern Russian?

Question: What does Southern Russian have a linguistic continuum with?
Passage: Among the first to study Russian dialects was Lomonosov in the 18th century. In the 19th, Vladimir Dal compiled the first dictionary that included dialectal vocabulary. Detailed mapping of Russian dialects began at the turn of the 20th century. In modern times, the monumental Dialectological Atlas of the Russian Language (Диалектологический атлас русского языка [dʲɪɐˌlʲɛktəlɐˈɡʲitɕɪskʲɪj ˈatləs ˈruskəvə jɪzɨˈka]), was published in three folio volumes 1986–1989, after four decades of preparatory work.

Question: Who made the first dialectal Russian dictionary?

Question: In what century was the first dialectal Russian dictionary published?

Question: When did Lomonosov study Russian dialects?

Question: When were detailed maps of Russian dialects created?

Question: How long did it take to compile the Dialectological Atlas of the Russian Language?
Passage: Older letters of the Russian alphabet include ⟨ѣ⟩, which merged to ⟨е⟩ (/je/ or /ʲe/); ⟨і⟩ and ⟨ѵ⟩, which both merged to ⟨и⟩ (/i/); ⟨ѳ⟩, which merged to ⟨ф⟩ (/f/); ⟨ѫ⟩, which merged to ⟨у⟩ (/u/); ⟨ѭ⟩, which merged to ⟨ю⟩ (/ju/ or /ʲu/); and ⟨ѧ/⟨ѩ⟩⟩, which later were graphically reshaped into ⟨я⟩ and merged phonetically to /ja/ or /ʲa/. While these older letters have been abandoned at one time or another, they may be used in this and related articles. The yers ⟨ъ⟩ and ⟨ь⟩ originally indicated the pronunciation of ultra-short or reduced /ŭ/, /ĭ/.

Question: What did the old letter ⟨ѣ⟩ become?

Question: What did the old letters ⟨і⟩ and ⟨ѵ⟩ become?

Question: What did the old letter ⟨ѳ⟩ become?

Question: What did the old letter ⟨ѫ⟩ become?

Question: What did the old letter ⟨ѭ⟩ become?
Passage: Because of many technical restrictions in computing and also because of the unavailability of Cyrillic keyboards abroad, Russian is often transliterated using the Latin alphabet. For example, мороз ('frost') is transliterated moroz, and мышь ('mouse'), mysh or myš'. Once commonly used by the majority of those living outside Russia, transliteration is being used less frequently by Russian-speaking typists in favor of the extension of Unicode character encoding, which fully incorporates the Russian alphabet. Free programs leveraging this Unicode extension are available which allow users to type Russian characters, even on Western 'QWERTY' keyboards.

Question: What is 'moroz' a transliteration of?

Question: What is 'mysh' a transliteration of?

Question: What does 'moroz' mean?

Question: What font technology has reduced the need for transliteration?

Question: What does 'mysh' mean?
Passage: The Russian alphabet has many systems of character encoding. KOI8-R was designed by the Soviet government and was intended to serve as the standard encoding. This encoding was and still is widely used in UNIX-like operating systems. Nevertheless, the spread of MS-DOS and OS/2 (IBM866), traditional Macintosh (ISO/IEC 8859-5) and Microsoft Windows (CP1251) created chaos and ended by establishing different encodings as de facto standards, with Windows-1251 becoming a de facto standard in Russian Internet and e-mail communication during the period of roughly 1995–2005.

Question: Who created KOI8-R encoding?

Question: What system used CP1251 encoding?

Question: What systems used IBM866 encoding?

Question: What encoding did early Macs use?

Question: In what years was CP1251 encoding used in most Russian online usage?
Passage: According to the Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an optional acute accent (знак ударения) may, and sometimes should, be used to mark stress. For example, it is used to distinguish between otherwise identical words, especially when context does not make it obvious: замо́к/за́мок (lock/castle), сто́ящий/стоя́щий (worthwhile/standing), чудно́/чу́дно (this is odd/this is marvelous), молоде́ц/мо́лодец (attaboy/fine young man), узна́ю/узнаю́ (I shall learn it/I recognize it), отреза́ть/отре́зать (to be cutting/to have cut); to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words, especially personal and family names (афе́ра, гу́ру, Гарси́я, Оле́ша, Фе́рми), and to show which is the stressed word in a sentence (Ты́ съел печенье?/Ты съе́л печенье?/Ты съел пече́нье? – Was it you who ate the cookie?/Did you eat the cookie?/Was it the cookie that you ate?). Stress marks are mandatory in lexical dictionaries and books for children or Russian learners.

Question: What organization is the Institute of Russian Language part of?

Question: What can optional acute accents indicate?

Question: What is distinguished from 'lock' only by an accent, in Russian?

Question: What is distinguished from 'this is odd' only by an accent, in Russian?

Question: What is distinguished from 'wothwhile' only by an accent, in Russian?
Passage: The language possesses five vowels (or six, under the St. Petersburg Phonological School), which are written with different letters depending on whether or not the preceding consonant is palatalized. The consonants typically come in plain vs. palatalized pairs, which are traditionally called hard and soft. (The hard consonants are often velarized, especially before front vowels, as in Irish). The standard language, based on the Moscow dialect, possesses heavy stress and moderate variation in pitch. Stressed vowels are somewhat lengthened, while unstressed vowels tend to be reduced to near-close vowels or an unclear schwa. (See also: vowel reduction in Russian.)

Question: Who says Russian has 6 vowels?

Question: When are Russian vowels written differently?

Question: What dialect is standard Russian based on?

Question: What language does Russian treat hard consonants similar to?

Question: What is done to unstressed vowels?