One language—two alphabets: Petras Survilas’ letters in cyrillic and latin alphabets (beginning of the twentieth century)

The article deals with the analysis of Petras Survilas’ letters written both in the Cyrillicand in the Latin alphabets. The five surviving letters of Survilas were written in the Eastern Highland Lithuanian subdialect of the town of Pasvalys. Possible standard language influence, however, is evident in the usage of the diphthongs [ai], [ei] and of full (non-reduced) endings, in marking in the position of dialectal [ẹ]. Survilas’ orthography was highly influenced by the traditional (pre-standard) Lithuanian orthography that was used at the end of the 19th century and that was still prevailing in the prayer books. The pre-standard orthography affected not only Survilas’ writing habits in the Latin alphabet, but also the orthography of Cyrillic letters (cf. his digraphs and ). Moreover, Survilas’ Cyrillic orthography letters did not correspond to any of the known Cyrillic spelling systems proposed for Lithuanian. Thus, Survilas created his orthography himself.Survilas attended only Russian elementary school and received basic education only in the Cyrillic script. Therefore, he developed better writing skills in this alphabet rather than in Latin. This claim is supported by the usage of Cyrillic grapheme instead of expected , and marking of palatalized consonants in Cyrillic letters vs. non-differentiation of and in Latin letters. The fact, that Survilas used the Latin alphabet later, may be related to the addressee’s (his family in Pasvalys) (in)ability to read in Cyrillic. This can be supported by the fact that his sister’s and brother’s letters to their relatives were written only in Latin scrip