Editing Reforms of Russian orthography (section)

==Early changes==
[[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]]. No distinction was drawn between the vernacular language and the liturgical, though the latter was based on [[South Slavic languages|South Slavic]] rather than [[East Slavic languages|Eastern Slavic]] norms.  As the language evolved, several letters, notably the ''[[yus]]es'' (Ѫ, Ѭ, Ѧ, Ѩ) were gradually and unsystematically discarded from both secular and church usage over the next centuries.

The emergence of the centralized Russian state in the 15th and 16th centuries, the consequent rise of the state bureaucracy along with the development of the common economic, political and cultural space necessitated the standardization of the language used in administrative and legal affairs. It was due to that reason that the earliest attempts at standardizing Russian, both in terms of the vocabulary and in terms of the orthography, were made initially based on the so-called Moscow chancery language. From then and on the underlying logic of language reforms in Russia reflected primarily the considerations of standardizing and streamlining language norms and rules in order to ensure the language's role as a practical tool of communication and administration.<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137325044|title=Languages, Regional Conflicts and Economic Development: Russia. In: Ginsburgh, V., Weber, S. (Eds.). The Palgrave Handbook of Economics and Language.|last=Kadochnikov|first=Denis|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan.|year=2016|location=London|pages=538–580|access-date=11 February 2019|archive-date=7 March 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200307214655/https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137325044|url-status=live}}</ref>