706: Diglossia Nov 13, 2016

What English-speaker—nonnative or otherwise—wouldn't have cause to complain about it's illogical and inconsistent spelling rules? It's fair to say that the writing system is confusing and has many exceptions for every rule and generalization, but other languages have or have had some writing systems which make far less sense. The East Slavic languages, Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian, are all spoken, and as one would assume, therefore written differently. Nonetheless, at one point, all of the Slavic languages had a common literary-language, Old Church Slavonic, which gave the world the Cyrillic script. As modern Slavic languages diverged from each other, there was a period of time up until the 14th century in which the ancestors of modern day Belarusians, Russians, and Ukrainians all spoke their own dialects of Old East Slavic, which was a different language than the one used for the writing system. This situation, called "diglossia" meaning 'bilingual' in Greek, happens on occasion when a language changes over time from the standard forms which are still enforced, such as with formal Arabic, based off of the Qur'an, and informal, spoken Arabic.