Capitalization in Russian

Russian grammar: Russian spelling

In general, the Russians use capitalization much less than the English speakers. For example, the names of languages and days of the week must start from the lowercase in Russian. In order for you not to get confused, we’ve prepared this lesson about the capitalization rules in the Russian language.

It’s actually quite easy to remember: there are only two cases where you have to capitalize the first letter of the Russian words. They are:

– a proper name:

А́нна (Anna)
Фра́нция (France)
Москва́ (Moscow)

– the first letter in a sentence.

Do not capitalize:

– words derived from proper names:

Москва́ – моско́вский (of Moscow);

– words designating nationality:

францу́з (French person)
ру́сский (Russian person)
италья́нец (Italian person)

– titles and modes of address:

профе́ссор (professor)
до́ктор (doctor)
господи́н (sir)

– days of the week and months:

янва́рь (January)
понеде́льник (Monday).

And this is it for this lesson. Practice today’s examples with the audio recording and memorize new vocabulary.

The offline version of this lesson is available here

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• 074. Russian spelling rules
• 076. Russian adverbs