The End of an Era

Abstract

The written Russian language has evolved dramatically over the course of the centuries and has led a complex path of development prior to the orthographic reform of 1918. Starting off as generally a spoken language, the Russian language was without a written alphabet until the early 900s AD with the adoption of the Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets. The complex situation which took place over the centuries through the usage of Old Church Slavonic and the spoken everyday language thus had large effects on the development of Russian as a single and coherent language. This dissertation aims to explore the path of development of the written Russian language to its arrival at the complex state prior to the 1918 reform. In particular, it aims to find out any factors or influences as to why the reform had occurred in this year specifically. In doing so, it will explore linguistic and political reasons for the reform, any obstacles and factors which may have hindered the implementation of the reform prior to 1918, and the results and effects upon the society and language as a whole. Upon exploring the history of the language and its development, the complicated path of its unification becomes clearer. The effects on the then-forming Soviet Union make more sense in light of goals and other sociolinguistic motivations. It is worthy of research to find the impact of this reform in the course of Russian’s development to its modern 21st-century state, and how the language reform had affected the society during such an important time of the country’s history, that of Soviet time.