A New “Campaign for Orthoepy”: Old Moscow Pronunciation as a Linguistic and Cultural Phenomenon

The article presents an analytical study and a polemical discussion of the ideas outlined in O. V. Antonova’s book “Old Moscow pronunciation: history and modernity” (Moscow, 2025). It is emphasized that this problem has not received an unambiguous solution in the history of linguistics. Throughout the 20th century, the status and characteristics of this original phenomenon drew sustained scholarly attention, with significant contributions from F. E. Korsh, D. N. Ushakov, S. S. Vysotsky, M. V. Panov, among others. The work gives an assessment of the views on the origins and development of Old Moscow pronunciation in the past and present. Its markers are named and discussed. The emphasis is placed on controversial positions related to the difficulty of determining the social origin of the Moscow norm. Special attention is paid to its reflexes in the field of consonantism and vocalism in the literary language of the late 20th — first decades of the 21st century. It is pointed out that despite the general trend towards the extinction of the Old Moscow norm in speech practice its individual characteristics remain, which indicates the conservativeness of orthoepic processes, their resistance to changing fashions and their inclusion in the modern thesaurus. Quantitative data on the use and variation of pronunciation norms in the works of Russian poets are summarized. The prospects of studying the Old Moscow pronunciation are shown. It is argued that it is necessary to analyze, in the context of the problem under study, normative explanatory and orthoepic dictionaries, to search for archival materials on the history of linguistics, and to conduct new experiments on recording spoken speech.