Old Belarusian Language

Old Belarusian Language

Old Belarusian was a historic East Slavic language, written and spoken at least in the 14th–17th century, and reported spoken as late as the very beginning of the 19th century, in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and later in the East Slavic territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, probably in the part of Grand Duchy of Moscow.

The modern Belarusian language was redeveloped on the base of the vernacular spoken remnants of the Old Belarusian, surviving on the ethnic Belarusian lands in the 19th century.

The denotation "Old Belarusian" for this entity is of academic origin and was introduced by Karskiy in 1893, and was based on its genetical identity with the vernacular Belarusian, as it existed in the 19th century. No reliably known native contemporary name for the language is known, and there were many different denotations used by contemporaries, some of them ambiguously (see nomenclature).

In the Western linguistics nomenclature, the Old Belarusian, together with Old Ukrainian, is regarded as a part of a single umbrella entity "Ruthenian language" which denotes the literary language of all of the East Slavic (and not distinctly Old Church Slavonic) texts coming from the Grand Duchy and Commonwealth in 14th—18th century (see formation).