An examination of the legacy of two Russian linguists of the early Soviet period, Boris Alexandrovich Larin (1893–1964) and Lev Petrovich Iakubinskii (1892–1945), shows that their interest in ‘living vernacular speech’ (‘zhivaia razgovornaia rech'’), so typical of the sociolinguistic approach to language study, served as a source of genuine inspiration that led them to a novel approach to Russian language studies in early Soviet linguistics. It also provided them with what largely constituted their source of data – everyday language, mostly spoken (or transcribed spoken language) and all language varieties rather than just the standard one.

Representatives of the first generation of Soviet linguists, Boris Larin and Lev Iakubinskii advanced the sociological paradigm in Russian linguistics in the beginning of the 20th century while simultaneously pursuing traditional lines of research. They had been educated as linguists by, inter alia, Jan (Ivan) Baudouin de Courtenay, a linguist of exceptional abilities and a person of liberal values, active civic orientation and political awareness, and by Aleksei Shakhmatov, who imbued them with his love for ‘living speech’. Both Larin and Iakubinskii lived and worked in Leningrad; their professional paths crossed at Petrograd- Leningrad University and the Herzen Pedagogical Institute, the institutions where they worked in various capacities in the 1920–1930s, and at seminars at ILIaZV (Institut sravnitel'noi istorii iazykov i literatur zapada i Vostoka (Institute for Comparative History of the languages and Literatures of the West and East), which promoted creative thought and new research.