Editing Old Church Slavonic (section)

==Role in modern Slavic languages==
Old Church Slavonic was initially widely intelligible across the Slavic world.{{sfn|Sussex|Cubberley|2002|p=64}} However, with the gradual differentiation of individual languages, Orthodox Slavs and, to some extent, Croatians ended up in a situation of [[diglossia]], where they used one Slavic language for religious and another one for everyday affairs.{{sfn|Sussex|Cubberley|2002|p=65}} The resolution of this situation, and the choice made for the exact balance between Old Church Slavonic and vernacular elements and forms is key to understanding the relationship between (Old) Church Slavonic and modern Slavic literary languages, as well as the distance between individual languages.{{sfn|Sussex|Cubberley|2002|p=63–65}}

It was first Russian [[polymath]] and grammarian [[Mikhail Lomonosov]] that defined in 1755 "three styles" to the balance of Church Slavonic and Russian elements in the Russian literary language: a high style—with substantial Old Church Slavonic influence—for formal occasions and heroic poems; a low style—with substantial influence of the vernacular—for comedy, prose and ordinary affairs; and a middle style, balancing between the two, for informal verse epistles, satire, etc.{{sfn|Kamusella|2008|p=280}}{{sfn|Sussex|Cubberley|2002|p=83}}

The middle, "Slaveno-Russian", style eventually prevailed.{{sfn|Kamusella|2008|p=280}} Thus, while standard [[Russian language|Russian]] was codified on the basis of the [[Central Russian dialects|Central Russian dialect]] and the [[Moscow]] chancery language, it retains an entire stylistic layer of Church Slavonisms with typically Eastern South Slavic phonetic features.{{sfn|Sussex|Cubberley|2002|p=477–478}} Where native and Church Slavonic terms exist side by side, the Church Slavonic one is in the higher stylistic register and is usually more abstract, e.g., the neutral {{script|Cyrs|город}} (''g'''oro'''d'') vs. the poetic {{script|Cyrs|град}} (''g'''rа'''d'') ('town').{{sfn|Sussex|Cubberley|2002|p=478}}

[[Bulgarian language|Bulgarian]] faced a similar dilemma a century later, with three camps championing Church Slavonic, Slaveno-Bulgarian, and New Bulgarian as a basis for the codification of modern Bulgarian.{{sfn|Kamusella|2008|p=280}} Here the proponents of the analytic vernacular eventually won. However, the language re-imported a vast number of Church Slavonic forms, regarded as a legacy of Old Bulgarian, either directly from Russian Church Slavonic or through the mediation of Russian.{{sfn|Sussex|Cubberley|2002|p=480}}

By contrast, [[Serbian language|Serbian]] made a clean break with (Old) Church Slavonic in the first half of the 1800s, as part of [[Vuk Karadžić#Linguistic reforms|Vuk Karadžić's linguistic reform]], opting instead to build the modern Serbian language from the ground up, based on the [[Eastern Herzegovinian dialect]]. [[Ukrainian language|Ukrainian]] and [[Belarussian language|Belarussian]] as well as [[Macedonian language|Macedonian]] took a similar path in the mid and late 1800s and the late 1940s, respectively, the former two because of the association of Old Church Slavonic with stifling Russian imperial control and the latter in an attempt to distance the newly-codified language as further away from Bulgarian as possible.{{sfn|Sussex|Cubberley|2002|p=86}}{{sfn|Kamusella|2008|p=229}}