Laravel localization in Russian Русский

Locale codes

Set the base locale in config/app.php. For regional variants, Russian commonly uses: ru_RU, ru_BY, ru_KZ, ru_UA

// config/app.php
'locale' => 'ru',
'fallback_locale' => 'en',

// Or switch at runtime
App::setLocale('ru');

Plural rules: what Russian actually needs

CLDR defines 4 cardinal categories for Russian. The sample numbers below were computed by ICU for this exact locale:

Laravel's trans_choice() maps numbers to 3 pipe-separated forms for this locale:

// lang/ru/messages.php
'items' => ':count item|:count items'

// Usage
trans_choice('messages.items', $count, ['count' => $count]);

This language uses 3 plural forms. Laravel's built-in trans_choice only resolves two, so for grammatically correct output use an ICU MessageFormat package or handle the extra forms explicitly against the CLDR categories above.

Try any number live in the pluralization tester.

Localized dates with Carbon

Real output for Russian (ru locale), generated by Carbon for March 21, 2026:

$date = now()->locale('ru');

$date->translatedFormat('l, j F Y');
// "суббота, 21 марта 2026"

$date->isoFormat('LLLL');
// "суббота, 21 марта 2026 г., 14:30"

$date->isoFormat('L');
// "21.03.2026"

$date->subDays(3)->diffForHumans();
// "3 месяца назад"

What to watch out for in Russian

• Six grammatical cases: noun forms change inside sentences, so avoid raw placeholder insertion.
• Plural rules use one/few/many/other categories (1, 2-4, 5+ patterns that repeat by tens).
• Ты/вы formal-informal distinction; three grammatical genders with adjective and past-tense agreement.
• Decimal comma with (non-breaking) space as thousands separator (1 234,56); dates are dd.mm.yyyy.

Framework strings already translated

Laravel's own validation, auth and pagination strings are maintained in Russian by the open-source Laravel-Lang project (MIT). Install them, then manage your app's own strings live:

composer require laravel-lang/common --dev
php artisan lang:add ru
php artisan lang:update