Ego-documents in Lithuanian

Following the language history from below approach, this article aims to take a closer look at the scope of the script and spelling reforms for Lithuanian at the turn of the twentieth century and their effect on the writing strategies of “ordinary” population. The data consists of 122 Lithuanian letters written by 42 individuals between 1894 and 1939. The analysis reveals that at the turn of the twentieth century at least one generation of Lithuanians employed two scripts (Cyrillic and Latin) for Lithuanian. The distribution of pre-standard and standard orthographic variants in lower class letters points to the conclusion that pre-standard (“Polish”) graphs did not have as strong a symbolic (ideological) power for the “ordinary” population as they had for the Lithuanian intellectuals of that time.