Old Ruthenian language
The Old Russian language, also called the Old Ruthenian language, or, perhaps Late Old East Slavic is the name for a language, whose dialects were spoken, though not exclusively, roughly in the area today occupied by European Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Poland and Lithuania in the tenth to the sixteenth centuries. States in which this language was at one time or another official or co-official included Lithuania, Muscovy, Novgorod, Kiev, etc: the area once called Rus'. It should not be confused with the Church Slavonic, Old Church Slavonic nor the Russian languages. The Old Russian language is the predecessor to the modern Ukrainian, Rusyn or Ruthenian, and Belarusian languages, as well as, of course, to the modern Russian language. The modern literary Russian has been influenced by Church Slavonic to a far greater extent than the others.
It is impossible to consider this language standardised in the modern sense. The spoken language in Rus' consisted of a variety of dialects, and today we may speak definitely only of the languages of surviving manuscripts, which from the earliest stages (tenth or eleventh centuries) show regional divergences. Surviving literary works are almost entirely on the theme of Christianity, the state religion in Kievan Rus' after 988 and therefore of great influence on officialese as well (for example the eleventh-century legal code of Yaroslav the Wise called Russkaya Pravda). A significant admixture of Church Slavonic in the extant manuscripts is therefore inevitable. The surviving purely secular writing, such as the Novgorod letters on birch-bark, and inscriptions on coins and memorial markers, are in general too short to provide more than hints about linguistic development.
The Tale of Igor's Campaign is considered the most outstanding literary work in this language.
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