The primary purposes of this book are to highlight the importance of Colloquial Russian in the classroom and to identify the differences between standard textbook presentations and the actual conversational Russian of educated native speakers. This is the first book in English to present Colloquial Russian as a coherent linguistic system. Chapters show linguistic evidence of its systemic patterns. Based primarily on tape-recorded examples by Soviet/Russian scholars from Moscow and Leningrad, the book presents an outline of the more salient linguistic features of colloquial phonetics, morphology, syntax, word order and vocabulary. The last chapter presents some recommendations on how various elements of colloquial Russian may be introduced into the classroom.