The Liturgical Language of the Russian Church

Old Church Slavonic was created in the ninth century by Cyril and Methodius to carry Christian scripture and worship into a Slavic language, and it is the first literary Slavic language. What is used in Russian churches today is its descendant rather than itself. Over centuries of copying, the language absorbed the pronunciation and part of the vocabulary of the East Slavic scribes who transmitted it, producing a Russian recension distinct from the Serbian, Bulgarian and Croatian recensions that developed in parallel, and that recension was fixed in the printed service books of the seventeenth century and standardised further under the Synod. It is not and has never been anybody's mother tongue. It is a register held for a purpose: the liturgy, the psalter, the scripture read aloud in church, and the technical religious literature that surrounds them, including the icon painters' manuals called podlinniki, whose surviving manuscripts move between Church Slavonic and the Russian chancery language of their period depending on the copyist. Its relation to Russian is close enough that a Russian speaker catches much of a service and misconstrues some of it, which is a recurring pastoral argument rather than a settled convenience.