ABSTRACT
The dialectal split of East Slavonic into Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian dates from the end of the first millennium AD. The earliest writing in the Kievan and Mongol periods (eleventh to fourteenth centuries) was in Old Church Slavonic, i.e. a literary medium based on South Slavonic: an influence which was fortuitously prom oted by an influx of South Slavonic clerics after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Thus fortified, the written language, which had pre viously perm itted some intermingling with East Slavonic forms, remained aloof from the more and more divergent East Slavonic spoken language until the eighteenth century, when, as part of the modernization programme of Peter the G reat, agreem ent on a standardized written and spoken norm was recognized as a most urgent necessity. W hat emerged was to some extent a compromise between w ritten South Slavonic and spoken East Slavonic - a compromise which can still be traced in the modern Russian language, e.g. in the presence of doublets representing East and South Slavonic versions of Proto-Slavonic roots, e.g. ESlav. golova ‘head’, SSlav. glava ‘chapter’.
