Russian Blog
This is a blog by JustRussian about learning Russian. You will find useful tips for learning Russian, Russian courses available in London, information about Russian culture and links to websites with information for students of Russian.
History of the Russian Language
By Vlada 9 July 10
Where does the Russian language come from? More info from a Russian teacher on something that you might want to know but will not learn in a Russian lesson.
Russian comes from the same source as English. It’s an Indo-European language, with its origin in Sanskrit, the ancient Indian language. But that’s a very broad classification, covering the whole “family” of languages. Narrowing it down, Russian is classified as a Slavic language, belonging to the Eastern branch of Slavic languages, along with Ukrainian and Byelorussian. In the Middle Ages (from the 6th to the 10th century) the Slavs, who occupied a large territory of Eastern Europe, from the Balkans in the south to the very North, had a common language – Old Slavonic, or Church Slavonic. Although the actual spoken languages of Slavic tribes may have differed from each other, the written version could be understood by all the Slavs. Even today, the grammatical structure of different Slavic languages is very similar, and it originates in Old Slavonic. I remember the bitter complaints of my fellow students at University who had to study Old Slavonic, about it being fiendishly complicated and awful to learn! (I didn’t have to learn it, fortunately or maybe unfortunately… my main subject was English, so we had to learn Old English!) If you compare words and grammar of different Slavic languages, you will see that it was clearly one language at some point in history which then split into several branches.
In the 9th century, two Greek missionaries, Cyril and Methodius, had to translate and write down Biblical texts in Old Church Slavonic, to convert Slavs to Christianity. For this purpose, Cyril devised a new alphabet, now known as the Cyrillic alphabet, based on the Greek alphabet, with a few additional letters invented to represent specific Slavic sounds.
Old Russian was one of the Slavic dialects, spoken in Eastern Europe, today’s Russia, until the end of the 13th century. Around this time the Russian language started to separate from the other Eastern Slavic languages (Ukrainian and Byelorussian). At the same time, the prevailing written language was still the Old Church Slavonic, introduced and supported by the Orthodox Church (Russia was christianised in the 10th century, having been a pagan culture before that). With time, written and spoken languages separated, but Old Slavonic remained as the literary and official language until the 18th century. By that time, it was almost incomprehensible for most ordinary people!
In the early 18th century, the Czar Peter the Great (who was determined to westernise Russia) introduced and promoted a large number of foreign words from Western languages that were borrowed and incorporated into Russian. This resulted in the mixture of the archaic Old Slavonic with borrowed Western words and colloquial Russian, which started being used in writing. Peter also simplified the Cyrillic alphabet, getting rid of some unnecessary Greek letters.
The famous Russian poet and Scientist Mikhail Lomonosov who lived in the 18thcentury, wrote about 3 different styles of Russian which were in use during his time: the high one, for high poetry and religion, the middle one, for literature, poetry, prose and science, and the low one, for personal communication and low comedy. The Middle Style, which combined features of East Slavonic dialect and Church Slavonic, became the basis of the modern Russian language. In the middle of the 19th century, modern Russian, based on the Moscow dialect, was formed and became the official language of the Russian Empire.
The first person who started writing in the modern colloquial Russian was Alexander Pushkin, the most famous Russian poet, the Russian equivalent of Shakespeare. He is considered the “father” of modern Russian. Poets before him used a very artificial bombastic language that no one spoke in real life!
Russian was the official language of the Russian Empire (which used to include Poland and Finland!), and later the Soviet Union. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 80-s the individual nation states have been reviving and bringing back their native languages. However, Russian remains the “lingua Franca” of the whole post-Soviet territory and Eastern Europe. In a recent census, 153 million people considered Russian to be their mother tongue and another 61 million said they spoke it fluently as a second language. The number of Russian speakers in the world is about 220 million.
So, we are looking forward to seeing you in our Russian lessons, so that you could join the club!