Editing East Slavic languages (section)

==History==

===Influence of Church Slavonic===
After the conversion of the East Slavic region to Christianity the people used service books borrowed from [[Bulgaria]], which were written in [[Old Church Slavonic]] (a [[South Slavic language]]).{{sfn|Sussex|Cubberley|2006|pp=63–65}} The Church Slavonic language was strictly used only in text, while the colloquial language of the [[Bulgarians]] was communicated in its spoken form.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Church Slavonic |url=https://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CC%5CH%5CChurchSlavonic.htm#:~:text=Church%20Slavonic%20was%20never%20a%20spoken%20language.%20It,was%20adopted%20as%20the%20church%20and%20literary%20language. |access-date=2025-03-24 |website=www.encyclopediaofukraine.com}}</ref>

Throughout the Middle Ages (and in some way up to the present day) there existed a duality between the Church Slavonic language used as some kind of 'higher' register (not only) in religious texts and the popular tongue used as a 'lower' register for secular texts. It has been suggested to describe this situation as ''[[diglossia]]'', although there do exist mixed texts where it is sometimes very hard to determine why a given author used a popular or a Church Slavonic form in a given context. Church Slavonic was a major factor in the evolution of modern Russian, where there still exists a "high stratum" of words that were imported from this language.{{sfn|Sussex|Cubberley|2006|pp=477–478}}