How Germans and Russians Made Their Orthographies

Correct spelling is a social construction created by scholars, teachers, officials, and other stakeholders. This book is a historical study of such processes in Germany and Russia and shows that they were part of a general societal, economic, political, and cultural evolution in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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This book is the first social constructionist study of spelling norms and spelling mistakes. Starting from the question of why, in the modern world, misspelling is considered evidence of incompetence, laziness, stupidity, or carelessness, the author traces the origins of such attitudes in German and Russian societies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Analyzing publications and archival sources, the author shows that in Germany the unification and codification of spelling rules and repressive attitude to errors were the result of the increased value of accuracy, unambiguity, and error-freeness in the economy and everyday life in the era of the industrial revolution, the political reaction after 1848, and the development of national school systems that combined training and moral education of schoolchildren and used formalized grading. In Russia, the borrowing of Prussian models during the school reform of the 1860s played a key role. Kirill Levinson shows what alternative solutions were proposed to overcome the significant problems that the inconsistencies of German and Russian orthographies posed: optimizing the rules to make them easier to learn and follow, making orthography more phonetic, moving from alphabetical writing to shorthand, medicalizing the issue, and making school education less repressive.