A Journey Through the History of the Russian Language
Russian has been changing for more than a thousand years, shaped by writing, literature, politics and contact with other languages. Here is a short tour from medieval Rus’ to today.
Old East Slavic (9th–14th centuries)
Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian share a common ancestor: the language of Kievan Rus’. Early on it developed its own features, such as gorod (town) and golova (head), where the Church Slavonic forms were grad and glava. Church Slavonic was the language of books and worship, while everyday Russian lived in speech and in birch-bark letters. The great epic of the period is The Tale of Igor’s Campaign (12th century). Novgorod spoke a dialect so distinct that some linguists see it as almost a separate language.
Middle Russian (15th–17th centuries)
As Moscow rose to power, its way of speaking became the standard. Printing arrived in the 16th century, and travel writing flourished, like Afanasy Nikitin’s Journey Beyond Three Seas. In 1708 Peter the Great introduced a new, simpler civil alphabet.
The Age of Literature (18th–19th centuries)
Lomonosov wrote the first Russian grammar in 1755. Writers like Karamzin, Krylov and above all Alexander Pushkin shaped the modern literary language, blending everyday Russian, Church Slavonic and foreign words. Russian borrowed from Polish, German and Dutch, and in the 19th century from French: balet, aktyor, garnizon. This is the rich language of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov.
Russian Today (20th–21st centuries)
The 1917 revolution brought a spelling reform and a wave of Soviet vocabulary. Since the 1990s, English has been the main source of new words: futbol, smuzi, onlain, mem, chat-bot. Russian keeps evolving, and a reader of Pushkin today understands almost every word he wrote 200 years ago.
Source: https://gramota.ru/journal/stati/nasledie/periody-razvitiya-russkogo-yazyka-drevniy-staryy-novyy-nash
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