Constantian (language)

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Constantian (Чонстантски) is the official language of the Holy Socialist Republic of Constantinopolis. It belongs to the Slavic family of Indo-European languages. Specifically, it is an East Slavic language closely related to Russian. However, it distinguishes itself from other Slavic languages through the extensive vocabulary it has borrowed from Greek.

The language now known as Old Constantian developed from Common Slavonic between the 10th and 15th centuries A.D., and was spoken by the common people inhabiting the territory of present-day Constantinopolis. The nobles and rulers, meanwhile, usually spoke Greek, since they were educated by Greek missionnaries who began to arrive in the 11th century. From the unification of Constantinopolis in 1436 to the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a deep language gap existed between the aristocracy and the rest of the population. In the 19th century, however, capitalism triumphed over the old feudalist system and a new ruling class, the bourgeoisie, came to power. Due to its non-aristocratic roots, the bourgeoisie spoke Constantian, not Greek. Therefore, Constantian slowly began to replace Greek as the language of the rulers of Constantinopolis. At the same time, in trying to emulate "aristocratic behaviour", the bourgeois capitalists adopted many Greek words and phrases in their common speech, which eventually filtered down to the working class as well, and began to be used in conversation by everyone. Thus, modern Constantian came to include many Greek influences, mostly in terms of vocabulary.

Greek was still used in official documents until 1917, when the language gap was finally abolished following the Great September Revolution, and Constantian became the only official language of Constantinopolis.