Old Novgorod dialect

The Old Novgorod or Old Novgorodian dialect (Russian: древненовгородский диалект, romanized: drevnenovgorodskiy dialekt, lit. 'ancient Novgorodian dialect') was the East Slavic variety used in the city of Veliky Novgorod and its surrounding area. It is mainly known from medieval birch bark writings dating to the 11th to 15th centuries. Andrey Zaliznyak distinguished it from "supra-dialectal Old Russian". Other manuscripts have also shown distinct north Russian dialect forms, in addition to the birch bark letters.
Old Novgorodian is of particular interest in that it has retained some archaic features which were lost in other Slavic dialects. For example, the birch bark letters from the Novgorod-Pskov area attest that the second palatalization failed to reach this area. Furthermore, the letters provide unique evidence of the Slavic vernacular, as opposed to the Church Slavonic which dominated the written literature of the period. Most of the letters feature informal writing such as personal correspondence, instructions, complaints, news, and reminders. Such widespread usage indicates a high level of literacy, even among women and children. The preserved notes display the original spelling of the time; unlike some texts, they were not copied, rewritten or edited by later scribes.
Today, the study of Novgorodian birch bark letters is an established scholarly field in Russian historical linguistics, with far-ranging historical and archaeological implications for the study of the Russian Middle Ages.
The first birch bark letter, called N1, was found in the city of Novgorod on July 26, 1951, by Nina Fedorovna Akulova. It was written in what is now called Old Novgorodian. As of 2018, a total of 1,222 items have been discovered in 12 cities, of which 1,113 were found in Novgorod. Nearly all others have been found in nearby cities, including 49 in Staraya Russa and 19 in Torzhok. Among the most notable letters found is N202 discovered in 1956, which was written by a young boy called Onfim who lived in Novgorod and is dated to the 13th century.
In Russian, the study of birch bark letters is informally known as berestologiya. It is unknown how many birch bark letters have gone undiscovered; less than three percent of the city of Novgorod has been systematically excavated. V.L. Janin, the head of the Novgorod Archaeological Expedition, estimated that more than 20,000 remain to be discovered in Novgorod alone. Although the birch bark letters do not contain explicit dates, archaeologists have been able to date them with an accuracy of 10 to 15 years using methods including stratigraphy and dendrochronology. They can be dated even more precisely if historical names or events are mentioned.
Almost all of them were written with styluses of bronze and iron, and never ink. The letters were preserved due to the swampy soil which isolated them from oxygen. Many letters are found buried amidst the layers under streets which were previously paved with logs.
The mainstream view is that the Old Novgorod dialect is an East Slavic variety that has some significant deviations from what Andrey Zaliznyak calls "supra-dialectal Old Russian", although there have been some attempts to classify it as a separate branch of the Slavic languages. As Church Slavonic was used in liturgical and religious writing, while a supra-regional variety was used for trade, it is unclear to what extent Novgorodians at the time would have considered them to have been separate languages or distinct registers of a single language. In addition, there is some variation in birch bark letters due to a lack of standardization that is seen with modern literary languages. Some texts are also written with a mixture of Church Slavonic and Old Novgorodian, but others are written in a pure vernacular.
The short birch-bark texts are written in a peculiar Slavic vernacular, reflecting living speech, and almost entirely free of the heavy Church Slavonic influence seen in the literary language of the period. Some of the observed linguistic features are not found in any other Slavic dialect, representing important Proto-Slavic archaisms.
Zaliznyak differentiates the Old Novgorod features that were already known before the discovery of the birch bark letters and those that have been ascertained after their study during the last few decades such as the following:
Features of the Old Novgorod dialect ascertained by the philological study in the last decades are:
Often the orthography is domestic (as opposed to bookish), using ъ and о on the one hand and ь and е on the other synonymously (about 50% of birchbark manuscripts from the mid-12th to the late 14th century).
The Novgorod material is divided by Zaliznyak into seven chronological groups:
According to Zaliznyak, the Old Novgorod linguistic features, instead of being merely isolated deviations, represent a bundle of peculiar isoglosses. The deviations are more abundant in older birch bark letters than in the more recent finds. This fact indicates, contrary to what may be expected, that the development was convergent rather than divergent, with regard to other northern East Slavic dialects.
According to Zaliznyak, the discovery of Old Novgorod dialect suggests that earlier conceptions which held East Slavic as a relatively homogeneous linguistic grouping, have been dispelled by a view advancing it instead as an area of much greater dialectal diversity. Zaliznyak divides the East Slavic area into two dialectal groupings: Proto-Novgorodian-Pskovian on one side, singled out chiefly on the basis of two instances lacking second palatalization of velars and the ending -e in nominative singular of masculine o-stems, and all the remaining East Slavic dialects on the other.
Dated between the end of the 11th century and the 1110s; excavated 1954.
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Dated between the 1340s and 1380s; excavated 1972.
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