Old Novgorod dialect (
Russian ?????????????????? ???????, also translated as
Old Novgorodian or
Ancient Novgorod dialect) is a term introduced by
Andrey Zaliznyak (?????? ??????????? ????????) to account for the astonishingly distinct linguistic features of the
East Slavic birch bark writings ("berestyanaya gramota") from the
11th to
15th centuries excavated in
Novgorod and its surroundings since the middle of the
20th century, around a thousand of which have been found so far.
The short birch-bark texts are written in a peculiar Slavonic vernacular almost entirely free of church slavonic influence that has several features not known in any other Slavonic language, e.g.
The orthography is also very special, using ? and ? on the one hand and ? and ? on the other synonymically.
(between end of 11th century and 1110s; excavated 1954)
