Page "Old Church Slavonic" Paragraph 9

Old Church Slavonic is evidenced by a relatively small body of manuscripts, most of which were written in Bulgaria during the late 10th and the early 11th centuries.

The language has a Southern Slavic basis with an admixture of Western Slavic features inherited during the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius to Great Moravia ( 863 – 885 ).

The only well-preserved manuscript of Moravian dialect, the Kiev Folia, is characterised by the replacement of some Southern Slavic phonetic and lexical features with Western Slavic ones.

Manuscripts written in the medieval Bulgarian tsardom have, on the other hand, few Western Slavic features.