Editing Old Novgorod dialect (section)

==Classification==
The mainstream view is that the Old Novgorod dialect is an [[East Slavic languages|East Slavic]] variety that has some significant deviations from what [[Andrey Zaliznyak]] calls "supra-dialectal Old Russian", although there have been some attempts to classify it as a separate branch of the Slavic languages.{{sfn|Dekker|2018|p=11|loc="Zaliznjak... calls this 'supra-dialectal Old Russian'... Some attempts have been made to classify Old Novgorodian as a separate Northern branch of the Slavic languages. The mainstream view is still that it is an East Slavic variety, though it has some significant deviations from the 'supra-regional' variety of Old Russian..."}} As [[Church Slavonic]] was used in liturgical and religious writing, while a supra-regional variety was used for trade, it is unclear to what extent Novgorodians at the time would have considered them to have been separate languages or distinct registers of a single language.{{sfn|Dekker|2018|p=11}} In addition, there is some variation in birch bark letters due to a lack of standardization that is seen with modern literary languages.{{sfn|Schaeken|2018|p=52}} Some texts are also written with a mixture of Church Slavonic and Old Novgorodian, but others are written in a pure vernacular.{{sfn|Schaeken|2018|p=52}}