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.

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.

The printed Russian alphabet began to assume its modern shape when Peter I introduced his civil script () type reform 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 and the replacement of Cyrillic numerals with Arabic numerals, 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 and Vasily Trediakovsky a phonemic one.

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, miscellaneous adjustments were made ad hoc, as the Russian literary language came to assume its modern and highly standardized form. These included the introduction of the letter ё (yo) and the gradual loss of ѵ (izhitsa, corresponding to the Greek upsilon and the Latin y), in favor of и (both of which represented /i/); and ѳ (corresponding to the Greek theta), in favor of ф or т. (The Russian language neither has nor ever had a "th" sound. The ѳ was used only for foreign words, particularly Greek.) By 1917, the only two words still usually spelled with ѵ were мѵро (müro, [ˈmʲirə], 'myrrh') and сѵнодъ (sünod, [sʲɪˈnot], 'synod'), and that rarely. The ѳ remained more common, though it became quite rare as a "Western" (French-like) pronunciation had been adopted for many words; for example, ѳеатръ (ḟeatr, [fʲɪˈatr], 'theater') became театръ (teatr, [tʲɪˈatr]). Attempts to reduce spelling inconsistency culminated in the standard textbook of Grot (1885), which retained its authority through 21 editions until the Russian Revolution of 1917. His fusion of the morphological, phonetic, and historic principles of Russian orthography remains valid to this day, though both the Russian alphabet and the writing of many individual words have been altered through a complicated but extremely consistent system of spelling rules that tell which of two vowels to use under all conditions.

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