A Diachronic Study on Vernacular(Prostorečie) in Russian

In the history of the development of the Russian language, vocabulary that could be the semantic origin of “prostorečie” first appeared in the 1090 section of Povesti vremennyx let and was used sporadically until the early 17th century. Prostorečie is exemplified as a complete vocabulary in the Bašmak Letter in the mid-17th century. In the mid to late 17th century, it was used more frequently to indicate specific meanings in the Life of Archpriest Avvakum, and during the reign of Peter the Great in the early 18th century, the bookish language was consciously transformed into ПР. In the mid-18th century, ПР was brought into the framework of bookish language by Lomonosov, and ПР first appeared as a marker word in dictionaries at the end of the 18th century. During this period, the content of ПР referred to all living languages excluding regional and social dialects and included ПН, but in the early 19th century, ПН became a sign of roughness, crudeness, and illiteracy, and was distinguished from ПР. In the first half of the 19th century, when the Russian literary language was beginning to form, the opposition between ПР and ПН was transformed into an opposition between РР and ПР in the modern Russian linguistic sense. ПР has its origins in koine, and although its meaning varies somewhat from era to era, the common meaning that lasted until the first half of the 19th century is that it is a non-Church Slavic language, that is, a nun-bookish language. To discuss it in more detail, it is as follows. 11th - until the mid-17th century, ПР meant koine and the written language of pilgrimage and travelogues, and from the mid-to-late 17th century it was used as an antithesis to the standard Church Slavonic, i.e., красноречие. During the reign of Peter the Great, the replacement of Church Slavonic with koine was recognized as the realization of ПР, and Church Slavonic began to be replaced with the non-bookish, koine. Since this work was an individual attempt by the literati in the absence of a unified representation of bookish language, it was not an uncommon phenomenon for texts mixed with Church Slavonic and non-Church Slavonic to appear. In other words, during the time of Peter the Great, the boundary between the bookish language and ПР naturally began to collapse, and subsequently, in Lomonosov's three style system, ПР came into the framework of the bookish language and acquired stylistic meaning. At the end of the 18th century, the content of ПР was expanded to include ПН, but in the process of forming Russian literary language in the 19th century, the rough and crude ПН was again excluded from ПР, turning ПР into РР in the modern Russian linguistic sense, and ПН into ПР. The РР is located in the buffer between the traditional bookish language and ПР of the modern Russian linguistic meaning.