History of the Russian language


is an East Slavic language of the Indo-European family. All Indo-European languages are descendants of a single prehistoric language, reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic era. Although no written records remain, much of the culture and religion of the Proto-Indo-European people can also be reconstructed based on their daughter cultures traditionally and continuing to inhabit most of Europe and South Asia, areas to where the Proto-Indo-Europeans migrated from their original homeland.

Periodization

No single periodization is universally accepted, but the history of the Russian language is sometimes divided into the following periods:
The history of the Russian language is also divided into Old Russian from the 11th to 17th centuries, followed by Modern Russian.

External history

Kievan Rus' period (9th–12th century)

The common ancestor of the modern East Slavic languages, Old East Slavic, was used throughout Kievan Rus' as a spoken language. The earliest written record of the language, an amphora found at Gnezdovo, may date from the mid-10th century. In writing, Old Church Slavonic was the standard, although from the 11th century, variations became distinguishable from Serb ones. Also in the 11th century, differences in written sources point to the slow emergence of distinct East Slavic languages.
During the pre-Kievan period, the main sources of borrowings were Germanic languages, particularly Gothic and Old Norse. In the Kievan period, however, loanwords and calques entered the vernacular primarily from Old Church Slavonic and from Byzantine Greek:

Feudal and linguistic breakup (13th–14th century)

Kievan Rus' began to decline and fragment in the 12th century. From the 12th and 13th centuries, regional phonetic and grammatical variations within Church Slavonic texts could be detected, indicating the eventual divergence of the language. Around 1200, and especially after the sack of Kiev in 1240, when Mongols and Tatars established the Golden Horde in Eastern Europe, an autonomous spoken Russian language, largely independent from written Church Slavonic, began to develop. Nevertheless, Church Slavonic remained the literary standard in these central and northern regions for several more centuries.
After the Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus' in the 13th century, the vernacular language of the conquered peoples remained firmly Slavic. Turko-Mongol borrowings in Russian relate mostly to commerce and the military:
On the other hand, Ruthenian or Chancery Slavonic developed as a separate written form out of Old Church Slavonic, influenced by various local dialects and used in the chancery of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which came to dominate the western and southern lands of Rus'.

The Moscow period (15th–17th centuries)

After the Golden Horde gradually disintegrated in the late 15th and early 16th century, both the political centre and the predominant dialect in European Russia came to be based in Moscow. A scientific consensus exists that Russian and Ruthenian had definitely become distinct by this time at the latest. The official language in Russia remained a kind of Church Slavonic until the close of the 18th century, but, despite attempts at standardization, as by Meletius Smotrytsky in 1620, its purity was by then strongly compromised by an incipient secular literature. Vocabulary was borrowed from Polish, and, through it, from German and other Western European languages. At the same time, a number of words of native coinage or adaptation appeared, at times replacing or supplementing the inherited Indo-European/Common Slavonic vocabulary.
Much annalistic, hagiographic, and poetic material survives from the early Muscovite period. Nonetheless, a significant amount of philosophic and secular literature is known to have been destroyed after being proclaimed heretical.
The material following the election of the Romanov dynasty in 1613 following the Time of Troubles is rather more complete. Modern Russian literature is considered to have begun in the 17th century, with the autobiography of Avvakum and a corpus of chronique scandaleuse short stories from Moscow. Church Slavonic remained the literary language until the Petrine age, when its usage shrank drastically to biblical and liturgical texts. Legal acts and private letters had been, however, already written in pre-Petrine Muscovy in a less formal language, more closely reflecting spoken Russian. The first grammar of the Russian language was written by Vasily Adodurov in the 1740s, and a more influential one by Mikhail Lomonosov in 1755. Lomonosov argued for the development of three separate styles of written Russian, in which the higher and middle styles were still supposed to heavily draw upon Church Slavonic vocabulary. In the early 19th century, authors such as Karamzin and Pushkin set further literary standards, and by the year 2000, the common form of the Russian language had become a mixture of purely Russian and Church Slavonic elements.

Empire (18th–19th centuries)

The political reforms of Peter the Great were accompanied by a reform of the alphabet, and achieved their goal of secularization and modernization. Blocks of specialized vocabulary were adopted from the languages of Western Europe. Most of the modern naval vocabulary, for example, is of Dutch origin. Latin, French, and German words entered Russian for the intellectual categories of the Age of Enlightenment. Several Greek words already in the language through Church Slavonic were refashioned to reflect post-Renaissance European rather than Byzantine pronunciation. By 1800, a significant portion of the gentry spoke French, less often German, on an everyday basis.
At the same time, there began explicit attempts to fashion a modern literary language as a compromise between Church Slavonic, the native vernacular, and the style of Western Europe. The writers Lomonosov, Derzhavin, and Karamzin made notable efforts in this respect, but, as per the received notion, the final synthesis belongs to Pushkin and his contemporaries in the first third of the 19th century.
During the 19th century, the standard language assumed its modern form; literature flourished. Spurred perhaps by the so-called Slavophilism, some terms from other languages fashionable during the 18th century now passed out of use, and formerly vernacular or dialectal strata entered the literature as the "speech of the people". Borrowings of political, scientific and technical terminology continued. By about 1900, commerce and fashion ensured the first wave of mass adoptions from German, French and English.

Soviet period and beyond (20th century)

The political upheavals of the early 20th century and the wholesale changes of political ideology gave written Russian its modern appearance after the spelling reform of 1918. Reformed spelling, the new political terminology, and the abandonment of the effusive formulae of politeness characteristic of the pre-Revolutionary upper classes prompted dire statements from members of the émigré intelligentsia that Russian was becoming debased. But the authoritarian nature of the regime, the system of schooling it provided from the 1930s, and not least the often unexpressed yearning among the literati for the former days ensured a fairly static maintenance of Russian into the 1980s. Though the language did evolve, it changed very gradually. Indeed, while literacy became nearly universal, dialectal differentiation declined, especially in the vocabulary: schooling and mass communications ensured a common denominator.
The 1964 proposed reform was related to the orthography. In that year the Orthographic commission of the Institute of the Russian language, headed by Viktor Vinogradov, apart from the withdrawal of some spelling exceptions, suggested:
  • retaining one partitive soft sign
  • always writing instead of after
  • writing instead of after,,,, and if stressed or if not
  • not writing the soft sign after,,, and
  • canceling the interchange in roots -zar/-zor, -rast/-rost, -gar/-gor, -plav/-plov etc.; canceling the double consonants in loan words
  • writing only -yensk instead of two suffixes -insk and -yensk, write only -yets instead of -yets or -its
  • simplifying the spelling of in participles: write double in prefixal participles and ordinary in non-prefixal
  • always writing with hyphen the "Пол-" combinations with subsequent genitive of noun or ordinal number
  • writing the nouns beginning with vice-, unter-, ex- together instead of using hyphen
  • writing all particles separately
  • allowing the optional spelling of noun inflexions
The reform, however, failed to take root.
Political circumstances and the undoubted accomplishments of the superpower in military, scientific, and technological matters, gave Russian a worldwide if occasionally grudging prestige, most strongly felt during the middle third of the 20th century.
The political collapse of 1990–1991 loosened the shackles. In the face of economic uncertainties and difficulties within the educational system, the language changed rapidly. There was a wave of adoptions, mostly from English, and sometimes for words with exact native equivalents.
At the same time, the growing public presence of the Russian Orthodox Church and public debate about the history of the nation gave new impetus to the most archaic Church Slavonic stratum of the language, and introduced or re-introduced words and concepts that replicate the linguistic models of the earliest period.
Russian today is a tongue in great flux. The new words entering the language and the emerging new styles of expression have, naturally, not been received with universal appreciation.

Examples

The following excerpts illustrate the development of the literary language.
Spelling has been partly modernized. The translations are as literal as possible, rather than literary.