The words «mother,» «brother,» and «home» sound suspiciously similar from Iceland to India. The German Mutter, the English mother, the Latin mater, the Sanskrit matar, the Lithuanian motina. This cannot be a coincidence, because there are thousands of such correspondences and they rely on strict sound laws rather than accidental similarity.
And this is where the whole story begins. Russian did not just appear one day or get invented by someone; it grew out of speech that was spoken thousands of kilometers and thousands of years away from here, and along the way it changed several guises. Below, the path from this common ancestor to the language spoken at home today is broken down into stages.
Five thousand years in fifteen points
Click on a period to reveal what is behind it. What you have read marks itself as read.
Somewhere in the steppes or the Balkans lives a people whose speech will echo in English, Hindi, Lithuanian, and Russian thousands of years later. They do not know writing, and everything that is known about them has been uncovered by comparing descendant languages.
From the general Indo-European mass, a dialect emerges that linguists will later call Proto-Slavic. From the Oder to the Dnieper, its speakers understand each other without a translator.
Slavs occupy lands from the Balkans to the Baltics. Distances, mountains, and proximity to foreign peoples are taking their toll, and the unified language is beginning to break up into groups.
Old Russian began to take shape in the East Slavic lands. Along with Christianity came a literary language of southern origin, and from then on, the two streams flowed in parallel, exchanging words.
The residents of Novgorod carve letters on birch bark, and these notes ring with living speech rather than bookish language. They will only be discovered in the twentieth century, and they will upend notions of who in Kievan Rus' knew how to write.
The lands of former Rus’ ended up in different states, and East Slavic unity finally fell apart. The Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians each went their separate ways.
Peter the Great’s printing reform drew a distinction between texts intended for the church and those intended for practical use. Along with new trades, a flood of Dutch and German words entered the language.
Lomonosov completes *Russian Grammar*, the first systematic description of the Russian language. A few years later, he proposes dividing a syllable into three parts.
The Russian Academy was established to compile the first explanatory dictionary of the Russian language. Six volumes were published by 1794.
Pushkin’s writings show that literary and colloquial language can be freely mixed. The debate between the archaists and the innovators has resolved itself, and readers today can understand the language of that era without a dictionary.
Vladimir Dal is publishing a collection that includes about 200,000 words and 30,000 proverbs gathered from across the country, including dialectal and craft-related ones.
The reform eliminates several redundant letters and silent characters at the ends of words. This saves a significant amount of paper, and students no longer need to memorize lists of exceptions.
Words begin to appear, pieced together from fragments: kolkhoz, likbez, Narkomat. The old vocabulary of social classes and professions falls out of use along with the classes themselves.
The rules of Russian spelling and punctuation were adopted, and schools continue to follow them to this day. The inconsistencies in spelling that had persisted since pre-revolutionary times were finally resolved.
Along with the market, technology, and the Internet comes a flood of English words. The reaction mirrors that of Peter the Great and Karamzin: the older generation speaks of the corruption of the language, while the younger generation simply uses them.
An ancestor nobody has ever heard of
Linguists call it Proto-Indo-European. Its speakers lived about five or six thousand years ago, had no writing system, and left not a single recorded phrase behind. This language has been entirely reconstructed through calculation: by comparing hundreds of modern and dead languages, scientists deduce how the original word must have sounded and mark such reconstructions with an asterisk.
The method turned out to be unexpectedly reliable. The vocabulary of the reconstructed proto-language alone shows that its speakers knew snow, winter, a wolf, a horse, honey, and a wheel, whereas designations for the olive, grape, papyrus, and monkey are not found in the reconstructed vocabulary. Based on this set, geographers and archaeologists still debate the exact location of their homeland, since the Mediterranean south is rather ruled out by such a list. From this common foundation diverged almost all the languages of Europe, along with the Iranian and Indian ones, and the Slavic branch is among the latest of them.
Proto-Slavic, from which the entire Slavic family grew
A distinct Slavic speech emerged about a thousand years before our era, and then a long period began when people from the Oder to the Dnieper understood each other without any effort. Linguists retroactively named this language Proto-Slavic, because no one bothered to write it down either. However, it is reconstructed much more accurately than Proto-Indo-European, since it is closer to us by several millennia, and the Slavic languages have preserved their common heritage more carefully.
Unity lasted until the middle of the first millennium AD, and migration broke it. The Slavs occupied the space from the Balkans to the Baltic; mountains, forests, and foreign states lay between the communities, and speech began to diverge. They split into three groups. The southern branch remained in the Balkans and gave rise to Bulgarian and Serbian, the western to Polish and Czech, and the eastern later produced Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian. The divergence took centuries, and as late as the eleventh century, a resident of Kyiv could understand a Novgorodian without any translation.
The East Slavic language of this period is generally called Old Russian. It is the common ancestor of all three East Slavic languages, and this is the point where people most often get confused in conversations, declaring it to be the direct ancestor of Russian alone. The division into three separate languages stretched over centuries and was completed by the end of the Middle Ages, when the lands of former Rus ended up as parts of different states.
Two languages on one territory
Next, something happens that explains half the oddities of modern Russian vocabulary. When writing came to Rus', Old Church Slavonic became the literary language—created for translating church books on the basis of the South Slavic, Thessalonian dialect, and by no means the speech that was heard on the street. How the alphabet itself appeared in the process is analyzed in detail in a separate article about Cyrillic.
A situation arose for which linguists have a separate term: diglossia. One language for the church, chronicles, and high literature, the other for trade, quarrels, and birchbark letters. These two streams flowed side by side for centuries, exchanged words, and eventually merged, leaving a multitude of double pairs in Russian.
From this come «город» and «град», «берег» and «брег», «молоко» and «млеко», «ворота» and «врата», «голова» and «глава». The first in each pair is native, East Slavic, the second came from the bookish language. They now differ in weight, rather than meaning. At home, a person stands in the ворота (gates), but in a solemn speech, the врата (gates) open. The same story applies to the pairs «один and единый», «горячий and горящий», «свеча and освещение». Because of this, Russian has a double set of words for almost everything important. By the way, something similar happened with English, only there the bookish layer came from Latin and French, which is why next to the simple help stands the solemn aid, and next to begin stands commence.
Petrine Turn and the Secularization of Speech
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the literary language had completely divorced itself from the living one. A decree written in the rules of high style was difficult for an ordinary person to understand, and this suited Peter little, because the new army, navy, and industry required clear instructions.
The reform turned out to be twofold. First, the shapes of the letters were simplified and a civil typeface was introduced for secular books, separating them from church books. Then a flood of new words poured into the language, because along with shipbuilding, artillery, and accounting, Dutch, German, and Swedish names for all of these arrived as well. Sailor, helmsman, shipyard, necktie, accountant, and bill of exchange settled in Russian precisely back then.
Next, Lomonosov took up the baton. In his Russian Grammar, completed in 1755, he described the language as a system for the first time, and a few years later suggested dividing style into three categories—high, middle, and low—each with its own set of words. The idea was practical: to stop mixing church vocabulary with vulgar street language in the same text.
Pushkin, who brought it all together
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the debate over what the literary language should be was well underway. Some demanded sticking to the Church Slavonic foundation and keeping foreign elements out, while others urged writing the way people spoke in high-society salons, that is, with French word order and calques.
Everything was resolved by practice rather than debate. Pushkin simply began to write, freely mixing the bookish with the colloquial, the high with the domestic, and it turned out that this was possible and turned out better than either party's approach. After him, the norm ceased to be a matter of theory and became a fact, and the language of his texts is understood almost entirely by the modern reader, which cannot be said of texts even half a century older. Regarding how individual words were coined and put into circulation by the writers themselves, we have separate analysis.
Twentieth century, abbreviations and a new vocabulary
The revolution brought the spelling reform of 1918, which threw several duplicate letters out of the alphabet, but the language was changed much more not by that reform, but by the era itself. A wave of abbreviations and compound words appeared, such as never existed before, like kolkhoz, likbez, narkomat, and komsomol. Entire strata of words went out of use along with vanished classes and professions, and new ones came to take their place.
The second half of the century added scientific and technical vocabulary, and recent decades have brought a flood of English words that continues to this day, from manager and deadline to cringe. The reaction to this flood is always the same. The older generation considers it a corruption of the language, while the younger generation uses it without noticing. It was the same under Peter the Great with Dutch terms, and under Karamzin with French ones.
Who and when added words to Russian
Six layers of borrowing, each with its own era and its own reason.
| Where from | When | Why | What remains in the language |
|---|---|---|---|
| Greek | 10th-15th centuries | Arrived together with Christianity and literacy | angel, icon, notebook, beetroot, doll, tub, whale, philosophy. Many words have settled in so much that no one would suspect their Greek origin. |
| Turkic languages | 13th-16th centuries | Neighborhood, trade, and the steppe | money, shed, shoe, watermelon, raisin, pencil, iron, caftan, coachman. The word horse is also from here, despite the fact that the proper word steed didn't go anywhere. |
| Dutch and German | 18th century | Petrine shipyards, army and chancery | sailor, navigator, shipyard, cabin, lifeboat from Dutch, necktie, accountant, bill of exchange, fine, camp from German. Necktie literally means neckerchief. |
| French | 18th-19th centuries | Noble life, cuisine and theater | coat, broth, director, playbill, courage, luggage, portrait, soufflé. From the same source are loan translations like the expression to take place, tailored after the French model. |
| English | 20th-21st centuries | Sports, technology, business, and the web | football, match, meeting, sweater, manager, deadline, startup, cringe. The flow doesn't stop, and the last words of this series are usually about five years older than your child. |
| Latin | 18th-20th centuries | Science, law, and school subjects | radius, constitution, audience, compass, doctor, exam. This stratum came not directly from Rome, but through European languages, universities, and textbooks. |
What follows from this for those learning the language
Knowing history makes life easier in practical terms, not just by broadening one's horizons. It becomes clear why the word «gorod» (city) has a twin «grad» and why the second one sounds solemn. It is obvious where families of cognate words like «svecha» (candle), "svet" (light), "osveshcheniye" (illumination), "prosveshcheniye" (enlightenment) came from in Russian, where consonants alternate. It is understandable why half of the roots are recognizable in Polish and Czech, and why Bulgarian sounds familiar and incomprehensible at the same time.
When searching for «history of Russian language» and «origin of Russian language,» English-language sources usually start right with Cyril and Methodius, that is, with the writing system, and skip everything that came before it. At the same time, the language is older than its alphabet by millennia, and these two histories should not be confused.
Eight things you won't find in a school textbook
How linguists acquire knowledge about times without writing and what familiar words conceal.
An asterisk means nobody heard the words
Reconstructed forms of a proto-language are conventionally written with an asterisk: *matēr, *wódr̥, *kʷekʷlos. This sign serves as an honest warning that you are looking at a calculation, not a record. Not a single text in Proto-Indo-European exists; the entire language has been deduced by comparing its descendants using strict rules of sound correspondence.
The dispute over the ancestral homeland was about the beech and the salmon
In the nineteenth century, linguists searched for the homeland of the proto-language using the names of plants and fish. Since there is a common word for beech, they reasoned, it means the ancestors lived where the beech grows. They did the same with salmon. Both arguments later weakened because word meanings shift over time, and today they are cited rather as a lesson in caution.
The boy Onfim left his notebooks
Among the Novgorod birch bark letters, there are about a dozen and a half sheets belonging to a six- or seven-year-old boy who lived in the thirteenth century. He practiced writing letters, right there drew a horseman piercing an enemy, and signed the drawing with his name. These are the earliest children's school writings that have come down to us in Russian.
In German, a necktie is a neckerchief
The word came under Peter from the German Halstuch, where Hals means neck and Tuch means handkerchief. The French called the same thing cravate, after the name of Croatian mercenaries who wore such handkerchiefs. One item, two completely different naming histories.
Sunday is a day when nothing is done
Initially, that was only the name of the day off, the very day when no work is done. In Ukrainian and Polish, this meaning has been preserved, where тиждень and niedziela mean Sunday. In Russian, the name shifted to the entire seven-day period, while the previous meaning remained in the word понедельник (Monday), meaning the day after the week-off.
The doctor and to lie were once related
The ancient verb "vrat" meant to speak, and a "vrach" (doctor) was someone who charms away an illness. The meanings have drifted so far apart that the connection is now visible only to a specialist. A similar story applies to the word "pozor" [shame], which used to mean a spectacle, and the word "von" [stench], which simply meant a smell.
Full vocalism reveals the origin of the word
Full-voicing refers to the combinations oro, olo, ere, and ele between consonants, and they indicate an East Slavic word: gorod, moloko, bereg, shelom. The bookish variant of the same root is shorter; there it is ra, la, re, or le: grad, mleko, breg, shlem. The rule has exceptions, but by ear it works and helps identify which stratum the word came from.
Dal compiling a dictionary for half a century
Vladimir Dal, a physician and officer by profession, recorded words his entire life and collected about two hundred thousand, including dialectal, trade, and hunting terms. He wrote down his first word as a young midshipman after hearing the unfamiliar zamolazhivayet, meaning to become overcast with clouds, from a coachman.
Home
Russian grew out of the Proto-Indo-European language through Proto-Slavic and Old East Slavic, and at each of these stages it was shared by peoples who later parted ways. Its closest relatives are Ukrainian and Belarusian, slightly further away are Polish and Czech, and even further are Bulgarian and Serbian. The peculiarity of the Russian vocabulary is that it is dual, because living East Slavic speech coexisted for centuries with bookish Old Church Slavonic and eventually absorbed it. Later, the language underwent sharp turns under Peter the Great, acquired its standard under Pushkin, changed along with the twentieth century, and continues to change now, and all these layers are visible in it simultaneously. How many people speak it today and in which countries is calculated in separate article.
A language with a biography
For a child growing up outside of Russia, Russian often seems like just Mom's language, a strange set of rules with no backstory. Talking about the fact that the language has a biography, that it is a relative to half of Europe and older than any book, noticeably changes their attitude toward the subject. At Palme School, children from four to seventeen take Russian online in small groups, where such topics are included in classes right alongside grammar. You can see how it works at two free lessons, the first of which is an introduction with a methodologist who selects a group based on age and level, and the second is a trial lesson with a teacher and other students.
Frequently Asked Questions
How old is the Russian language?
It depends on what you consider the beginning. The Proto-Slavic community broke up about a thousand and a half years ago, Old Russian existed from the ninth to the fourteenth century, and the language we now recognize without a dictionary developed by the early nineteenth. At the same time, a continuous line of development stretches for thousands of years.
Is it true that Russian and Ukrainian are the same language?
No. They share a common ancestor, Old East Slavic, and therefore have many matching roots, but they are different languages with their own grammar, phonetics, and vocabulary. Roughly like Spanish and Portuguese, which also share a common Latin base.
Why are there six cases in Russian, but none in Bulgarian?
Both languages inherited cases from Proto-Slavic, but Bulgarian lost them over time, replacing them with prepositions and an article that attaches to the end of the word. Russian, on the contrary, preserved the system almost entirely. This is a good example of how related languages can diverge not only in vocabulary, but also in structure.
What are birch bark manuscripts and why are they important?
Birch bark manuscripts, the first of which was found in Novgorod in the summer of 1951. Since then, more than twelve hundred of them have been gathered in Novgorod alone, and finds have also been made in twelve other ancient Russian cities. Their value lies in the fact that they were written not by chroniclers, but by ordinary people, about debts, purchases, and family matters, in a lively spoken language. Thanks to them, it became clear that literacy in Rus was much more widespread than previously thought, and that women and children, among others, wrote.
Why were there yat letters and hard signs at the ends of words in the old orthography?
By that time, neither letter represented distinct sounds anymore and both were maintained purely by tradition. Yat was written in a specific list of words that were memorized using special rhymes, and the hard sign was placed after final consonants; a noticeable portion of any book's volume was spent on these silent signs. The 1918 reform removed them.
Why is Russian stress so difficult?
Because it is variable and mobile, it can fall on any syllable and shift when a word changes form, as in the pair «gorod» and «goroda.» In Polish, the stress is almost always on the penultimate syllable, in Czech on the first, and in French on the last, and the rule there can be learned in a minute. In Russian, there is no such rule; the stress has to be memorized along with the word.
