History of the Russian language

Russian 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.
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.
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:
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 c. 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'.
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 c. 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 (according to a general consensus among etymologists of Russian) 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 (1682–1725), 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 (Rossijskaja grammatika). Lomonosov argued for the development of three separate styles of written Russian, in which the higher and middle styles (intended for "the more respectable literary genres") 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.
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 (for example, виктория [vʲɪˈktorʲɪjə] > победа [pɐˈbʲɛdə], 'victory'), 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.
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 (Academy of Sciences of the USSR), headed by Viktor Vinogradov, apart from the withdrawal of some spelling exceptions, suggested:
The reform, however, failed to take root.
Political circumstances and the undoubted accomplishments of the superpower in military, scientific, and technological matters (especially cosmonautics), 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.
The following excerpts illustrate (very briefly) the development of the literary language.
Spelling has been partly modernized. The translations are as literal as possible, rather than literary.
c. 1110, from the Laurentian Codex, 1377
Old East Slavic, the common ancestor of Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian. Fall of the yers in progress or arguably complete (several words end with a consonant; кнѧжит 'to rule' < кънѧжити, modern княжить). South-western (incipient Ukrainian) features include времѧньнъıх 'bygone'; modern Russian временных). Correct use of perfect and aorist: єсть пошла 'is/has come' (modern Russian пошла), нача 'began' (modern Russian начал as a development of the old perfect.) Note the style of punctuation.
Слово о пълку Игоревѣ. c. 1200(?), from the Catherine manuscript, c. 1790.
Illustrates the sung epics. Yers generally given full voicing, unlike in the first printed edition of 1800, which was copied from the same destroyed prototype as the Catherine manuscript. Typical use of metaphor and simile. The misquote растекаться мыслью по древу ('to effuse/pour out one's thought upon/over wood'; a product of an old and habitual misreading of the word мысію, 'squirrel-like' as мыслію, 'thought-like', and a change in the meaning of the word течь) has become proverbial in the meaning 'to speak ornately, at length, excessively'.
1672–73. Modernized spelling.
Pure 17th-century central Russian vernacular. Phonetic spelling (тово всево 'it all, all of that', modern того всего). A few archaisms still used (aorist in the perfective aspect бысть 'was'). Note the way of transport to exile.
From "Winter Evening" (Зимний вечер), 1825. Modern spelling. listen
Modern Russian is sometimes said to begin with Pushkin, in the sense that the old "high style" Church Slavonic and vernacular Russian are so closely fused that it is difficult to identify whether any given word or phrase stems from the one or the other.
From Crime and Punishment (Преступление и наказание), 1866. Modern spelling.
19th century prose. No archaisms. "European" syntax.
Основные законы Российской Империи (Constitution of the Russian Empire), 1906. Modern spelling.
Illustrates the categorical nature of thought and expression in the official circles of the Russian Empire. Exemplifies the syntactic distribution of emphasis.
From The Master and Margarita (Мастер и Маргарита), 1930–40
An example of highly educated modern speech (this excerpt is spoken by Woland). See Russian humor for the essential other end of the spectrum.
The modern phonological system of Russian is inherited from Common Slavonic but underwent considerable innovation in the early historical period before it was largely settled by about 1400.
Like other Slavic languages, Old Russian was a language of open syllables. All syllables ended in vowels; consonant clusters, with far less variety than today, existed only in the syllable onset. However, by the time of the earliest records, Old Russian already showed characteristic divergences from Common Slavonic.
Despite the various sound changes, Russian is in many respects a relatively conservative language, and is important in reconstructing Proto-Slavic:
As with all other Slavic languages, the ultra-short vowels termed yers were lost or transformed. From the documentary evidence of Old East Slavic, this appears to have happened in the 12th century, about 200 years after its occurrence in Old Church Slavonic. The result was straightforward, with reflexes that preserve the front-back distinction between the yers in nearly all circumstances:
See the article on yers for the hypothesized pronunciation of these sounds and the meaning of the strong vs. weak distinction.
Examples:
The loss of the yers caused the phonemicization of palatalized consonants and led to geminated consonants and a much greater variety of consonant clusters, with attendant voicing and/or devoicing in the assimilation:
Unlike most other Slavic languages, so-called yer tensing (the special development of *ь > *i and *ъ > *y for some yers preceding /j/) did not happen in Russian, nor was /j/ later lost. Yers preceding /j/ developed as elsewhere; when dropped, a sequence Cʲj developed, which is preserved as such only in Russian. (*Cʲj > CʲCʲ in Ukrainian and Belarusian; elsewhere, it generally merged with *Cʲ or *Cj, or the /j/ was dropped early on.) The main exception to the lack of yer tensing is in long adjectives, where nominative *-ъjь becomes expected -óй (ój, [oj]) only when stressed, but -ый (yj, [ɨj]) otherwise (possibly influenced by Church Slavonic) and nominative *-ьjь (which is never stressed) always becomes yer-tensed -ий (ij). Although the spelling represents yer-tensing, pronunciation without yer-tensing is still possible: но́вый [ˈnovɨj~ˈnovəj] 'new', гро́мкий [ˈɡromkʲɪj~ˈɡromkəj] 'loud'. In adjectives ending in ⟨-кий, -гий, -хий⟩, pronouncing without yer-tensing (and consequently with an unpalatalized consonant, as it is followed by a morphophonemic |o|) is considered traditional Moscow pronunciation, but is now uncommon. Besides long adjectives (-ий, -яя, -ее, e. g. си́ний 'blue') the spelling -ий instead of expected *-ей for unstressed *-ьjь is also used in possessive adjectives (-ий, -ья, -ье, e. g. во́лчий 'wolf's'; the ordinal number тре́тий 'third' has the same declension) and in genitive plural forms of words ending in -ья or -ье (e. g. шалу́нья 'naughty girl', gen. pl. шалу́ний; but under stress: скамья́ 'bench', gen. pl. скаме́й).
Some yers in weak position developed as if strong to avoid overly awkward consonant clusters:
As shown, Czech and especially Polish are more tolerant of consonant clusters than Russian; but Russian is still more tolerant than Serbo-Croatian or Bulgarian: Proto-Slavic *mьglà "mist, haze" > мгла (mgla) (cf. Old Czech mgla, Polish mgła, but Serbo-Croatian màgla, Bulgarian мъгла́ (măglá)).
The nasal vowels (spelled in the Cyrillic alphabet with yuses), which had developed from Common Slavic *eN and *oN before a consonant, were replaced with nonnasalized vowels:
Examples:
In the case of Proto-Slavic *ę > Russian ja, the palatalization of the preceding consonant was due to the general Russian palatalization before all front vowels, which occurred prior to the lowering of *ę to /a/. If the preceding consonant was already soft, no additional palatalization occurred, and the result is written ⟨а⟩ rather than ⟨я⟩ when following the palatal consonants ш ж ч щ ц (š ž č šč c):
Nearly all occurrences of Russian я (ja) following a consonant other than л (l), н (n) or р (r) are due to nasal vowels or are recent borrowings.
Borrowings in the Uralic languages with interpolated /n/ after Common Slavonic nasal vowels have been taken to indicate that the nasal vowels existed in East Slavic until some time possibly just before the historical period.
In earlier Common Slavic, vowel length was allophonic, an automatic concomitant to vowel quality, with *e *o *ь *ъ short and all other vowels (including nasal vowels) long. By the end of the Common Slavic period, however, various sound changes (e.g. pre-tonic vowel shortening followed by Dybo's law) produced contrastive vowel length. This vowel length survives (to varying extents) in Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian and Old Polish, but was lost entirely early in the history of Russian, with almost no remnants. (A possible remnant is a distinction between two o-like vowels, e.g. /o/ and /ɔ/, in some Russian dialects, that may partly reflect earlier length distinctions.)
Proto-Slavic accentual distinctions (circumflex vs. acute vs. neoacute) were also lost early in the history of Russian. It has often been hypothesized that the accentual distinctions were first converted into length distinctions, as in West Slavic, followed by the loss of distinctive vowel length. Pretty much the only reflex of the accentual type is found in the stress pattern of pleophonic sequences like CereC, CoroC, ColoC (where C = any consonant); see below.
Notably, however, the position (as opposed to the type) of the accent was largely preserved in Russian as a stress-type accent (whereas the Proto-Slavic accent was a pitch accent). The complex stress patterns of Russian nouns, verbs and short adjectives are a direct inheritance from Late Common Slavic, with relatively few changes.
Pleophony or "full-voicing" (polnoglasie, полногласие [pəlnɐˈɡlasʲɪje]) is the addition of vowels on either side of /l/ and /r/ in Proto-Slavic sequences like CorC where C = any consonant. The specific sound changes involved are as follows:
Examples:
Note that Church Slavonic influence has made it less common in Russian than in modern Ukrainian and Belarusian:
When a Proto-Slavic sequence like *CerC was accented, the position of the accent in the resulting pleophonic sequence depends on the type of accent (circumflex, acute or neoacute). This is one of the few places in Russian where different types of accents resulted in differing reflexes. In particular, a sequence like CéreC, with the stress on the first syllable, resulted from a Proto-Slavic circumflex accent, while a sequence like CeréC, with the stress on the second syllable, resulted from a Proto-Slavic acute or neoacute accent. Examples:
Proto-Slavic *i and *y contrasted only after alveolars and labials. After palatals only *i occurred, and after velars only *y occurred. With the development of phonemic palatalized alveolars and labials in Old East Slavic, *i and *y no longer contrasted in any environment, and were reinterpreted as allophones of each other, becoming a single phoneme /i/. Note that this reinterpretation entailed no change in the pronunciation and no mergers. Subsequently, (sometime between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries), the allophone of /i/ occurring after a velar consonant changed from [ɨ] to [i] with subsequent palatalization of the velar. Hence, for example, Old Russian гыбкыи [gɨpkɨj] became modern гибкий [gʲipkʲij]. Conversely, the soft consonants *ž *š *c were hardened, causing the allophone of /i/ to change from [i] to [ɨ].
Proto-Slavic *ě (from Balto-Slavic and Proto-Indo-European long *ē) developed into Old Russian ѣ, distinct from е (the outcome of Proto-Slavic *e from Balto-Slavic and Proto-Indo-European short *e). They apparently remained distinct until the 18th century, although the timeline of the merger has been debated. The sound denoted ⟨ѣ⟩ may have been a higher sound than ⟨е⟩, possibly high-mid /e/ vs. low-mid /ɛ/. They still remain distinct in some Russian dialects, as well as in Ukrainian, where Proto-Slavic *e *ě *i developed into /e i ɪ/ respectively. The letter ѣ remained in use until 1918; its removal caused by far the greatest of all Russian spelling controversies.
Proto-Slavic stressed *e developed into /o/, spelled ё, when following a soft consonant and preceding a hard one. The shift happened after ш ж, which were still soft consonants at the time. The preceding consonant remained soft.
That has led to a number of alternations:
This development occurred prior to the merger of ѣ (yat) with е, and ѣ did not undergo this change, except by later analogy in a short list of words as of about a century ago. Nowadays, the change has been reverted in two of those exceptional words.
In the pronouns eя and нея, the stressed letter я (ya) /ja/ came to be pronounced [jo]; as a result, after the 1918 spelling reform, ея was rewritten as её and нея as неё.
Loanwords from Church Slavonic reintroduced /e/ between a (historically) soft consonant and a hard one, creating a few new minimal pairs:
Russian spelling does not normally distinguish stressed /e/ and /o/ following a soft consonant (and in some cases also following the unpaired consonants ж ш ц), writing both as е. However, dictionaries notate е as ё when pronounced as /o/.
This sound change also occurred in Belarusian as seen in the word for "flax": Belarusian and Russian лён /ˈlʲon/.
Modern Russian has extensive reduction of unstressed vowels, with the following mergers:
The underlying vowel resurfaces when stressed in related forms or words, cf. балда́ (baldá) [bɐlˈda] "sledgehammer", with genitive plural балд (bald) [balt], vs. корма́ (kormá) [kɐrˈma], with genitive plural корм (korm) [korm]. The spelling consistently reflects the underlying vowel, even in cases where the vowel never surfaces as stressed in any words or forms (e.g. the first syllables of хорошо́ (xorošó) "well (adverb)" and сапожо́к (sapožók) "boot") and hence the spelling is purely etymological. See Vowel reduction in Russian for more details.
There are exceptions to the rule given above: for example, ви́део "video" is pronounced as [ˈvʲidʲɪo] rather than [ˈvʲidʲɪə].
Simplification of Common Slavic *dl and *tl to *l:
Consonant clusters created by the loss of yers were sometimes simplified, but are still preserved in spelling:
Around the tenth century, Russian may have already had paired coronal fricatives and sonorants so that /s z n l r/ could have contrasted with /sʲ zʲ nʲ lʲ rʲ/, but any possible contrasts were limited to specific environments. Otherwise, palatalized consonants appeared allophonically before front vowels. When the yers were lost, the palatalization initially triggered by high vowels remained, creating minimal pairs like данъ /dan/ ('given') and дань /danʲ/ ('tribute'). At the same time, [ɨ], which was already a part of the vocalic system, was reanalyzed as an allophone of /i/ after hard consonants, prompting leveling that caused vowels to alternate according to the preceding consonant rather than vice versa.
Sometime between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, the velars became allophonically palatalized before /i/, which caused its pronunciation to change from [ɨ] to [i]. This is reflected in spelling, which writes e.g. ги́бкий (gíbkij) rather than *гы́бкый (gybkyj).
The palatalized unpaired consonants *š *ž *c depalatalized at some point, with *š *ž becoming retroflex [ʂ] and [ʐ]. This did not happen, however, to *č, which remains to this day as palatalized /t͡ɕ/. Similarly *šč did not depalatalize, becoming /ɕː/ (formerly and still occasionally /ɕt͡ɕ/). The depalatalization of *š *ž *c is largely not reflected in spelling, which still writes e.g. шить (šitʹ), rather than *шыть (šytʹ), despite the pronunciation [ʂɨtʲ].
Paired palatalized consonants other than /lʲ/ and sometimes /nʲ/ and /rʲ/ eventually lost their palatalization when followed by another consonant. This is generally reflected in spelling. Examples:
There is a tendency to maintain intermediate ancient [-ɡ-], [-k-], etc. before frontal vowels, in contrast to other Slavic languages. This is the so-called incomplete second and third palatalizations:
It is debated whether these palatalizations never occurred in these cases or were due to later analogical developments. A relevant data point in this respect is the Old Novgorod dialect, where the second palatalization is not reflected in spelling and may never have happened.
The Proto-Slavic palatal series of consonants (not to be confused with the later palatalized consonants that developed in Russian) developed as follows:
Many double consonants have become degeminated but are still written with two letters.
(In a 1968 study, long [tː] remains long in only half of the words in which it appears written, but long [fː] did so only a sixth of the time. The study, however, did not distinguish spelling from actual historical pronunciation, since it included loanwords in which consonants were written doubled but never pronounced long in Russian.)
A number of the phonological features of Russian are attributable to the introduction of loanwords (especially from non-Slavic languages), including:
Some of the morphological characteristics of Russian are: