Reforms of Russian orthography

The reform of Russian orthography refers to official and unofficial changes made to the Russian alphabet over the course of the history of the Russian language, and in particular those made between the 18th-20th centuries.

Early changes

The Old East Slavic adopted the Cyrillic script, approximately during the 10th century and at about the same time as the introduction of Eastern Christianity into the territories inhabited by the Eastern Slavs.

In this way, no sharp distinction was drawn between the vernacular language and the liturgical, though the latter was based on South Slavic rather than Eastern Slavic norms. As the language evolved, several letters, notably the yuses (Ѫ, Ѭ, Ѧ, Ѩ) were gradually and unsystematically discarded from both secular and church usage over the next centuries, and none of the several attempts at linguistic standardization properly succeeded.

18th-century changes

The printed Russian alphabet began to assume its modern shape when Peter I introduced his civil script (гражданскій шрифтъ, graždanskij šrift (spelled "гражданский шрифт" in modern Russian), [ɡrɐʐˈdanskʲɪj ˈʂrʲift]) in 1708. The reform was not specifically orthographic in nature. However, with the effective elimination of several letters (Ѯ, Ѱ, Ѡ, Ѧ) as well as all diacritics and accents (with the exception of й) from secular usage, there appeared for the first time a visual distinction between Russian and Church Slavonic writing. With the strength of the historic tradition diminishing, Russian spelling in the 18th century became rather inconsistent, both in practice and in theory, as Mikhail Lomonosov advocated a morphological orthography, Vasily Trediakovsky a phonetical one.

Russian orthography

Russian orthography (Russian: правописа́ние, tr. pravopisaniye; IPA: [prəvəpʲɪˈsanʲɪjə]) is formally considered to encompass spelling (Russian: орфогра́фия, tr. orfografiya; IPA: [ɐrfɐˈɡrafʲɪjə]) and punctuation (Russian: пунктуа́ция, tr. punktuatsiya; IPA: [pʊnktʊˈat͡sɨjə]). Russian spelling, which is quite phonemic in practice, is a mix of the morphological and phonetic principles, with a few etymological or historic forms, and occasional grammatical differentiation. The punctuation, originally based on Byzantine Greek, was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reformulated on the French and German models.

NOTE: The IPA transcription attempts to reflect vowel reduction when not under stress. The sounds that are presented are those of the standard language; other dialects may have noticeably different pronunciation for the vowels.

Spelling

Russian is written with a modern variant of the Cyrillic script. Russian spelling typically avoids arbitrary digraphs. Except for the use of hard and soft signs, which have no phonetic value in isolation but can follow a consonant letter, one phoneme is never represented with more than one letter.