Metalinguistic reflection as explicator of orthographic option choice

The article is devoted to the definition of the boundaries of the orthographic norm and description of the embodiment of its manifestation in writing practice. The object of the article is to identify the cases of orthographic variation in the modern Russian language in terms of their frequency and reasons of the choice preference of one or another variant by native speakers and to develop a typology of spelling variants. Metalinguistic reflection accompanying the answers of participants of the experiment (the sentences from the Russian National Corpus containing different written variants of tokens) allows us to define the priority of orthographic variants, to identify the most actual strategies and means used by native speakers to explain their choice, and to establish the language mechanisms that form the orthographic norm. The study reveals the possible ways of orthographic norm development. It allows one to determine a competition of the "new" and "old" orthographic variants in the language and to understand the causes of mistakes made by the students.