Old East Slavic, also known as
Old Russian (
Russian ?????????????) or
Old Ruthenian, was a vernacular literary language used from the 10th to the 14th centuries by
East Slavs in
Kievan Rus' and states which formed after its collapse.
Dialects of it were spoken, though not exclusively, roughly in the area today occupied by the European part of
Russia,
Belarus,
Ukraine and several eastern
voivodships of
Poland.
As the language is part of the (pre-)national history of all East Slavs, in recent years it has been increasingly named as
The language was a descendant of the Proto-Slavic language and faithfully retained many of its features. A striking innovation in the evolution of this language was the development of so-called full vocalism, which came to differentiate the newly evolving East Slavic from other Slavic languages. For instance, Proto-Slavic *gord? ‘town’ became (Old East SlavonicOES) gorod?, Proto-Slavic *melko ‘milk’ – OES moloko, and Proto-Slavic *korva ‘cow’ – OES korova. Other Slavic languages would develop such forms as grad?, mleko, krava (South Slavic, Czech and Slovak) or g?rod?, m?leko, k?rova (e.g. Polish gród, mleko, krowa), (Ukrainian ?????, ??????, ??????), etc.
Since extant written records of the language are sparse, it is difficult to assess the level of its unity. In consideration of the number of tribes and clans that constituded Kievan Rus, it is probable that there were many dialects of Old East Slavonic.Therefore, today we may speak definitively only of the languages of surviving manuscripts, which, according to some interpretators, show regional divergences from the beginning of the historical records.
