Russian

Russian is the North-Eastern branch of East Slavic, descended from the Old East Slavic of Kievan Rus, whose earliest surviving written trace is an inscription on an amphora at Gnezdovo from the middle of the 900s. For centuries writing meant Church Slavonic in Cyrillic.

Novgorod's birch bark letters of the 1000s to 1400s preserve the Old Novgorod dialect in private notes, complaints and the school exercises of the boy Onfim. After Kiev fell to the Mongols in 1240 the language developed on its own, and with the rise of Moscow in the late 1400s the Muscovite dialect became its centre.

Church Slavonic long kept its hold on literature, yielding in the Petrine age, when Peter the Great's reforms in 1708 to 1710 introduced a simplified civil script and opened the way for a standard built on Moscow speech.