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The article is aimed at finding ways for a systematically grounded determination of the causes of diachronic changes in any language, i.e. at the creation a way to explain any linguistic changes not by arbitrarily chosen single causes, but as a result of the interaction of social factors and intralinguistic factors caused by them. The article focuses on two processes taking place in the modern Russian language: the loss of declension by toponyms ending in -in(o), -ov(o) (for example, Ya zhivu v Pushkino / Butovo instead of Ya zhivu v Pushkine / Butove) and the replacement of the toponymic model Pushkinskaya ulitsa (ʻPushkin streetʼ) with the model ulitsa Pushkina (ʻthe street of Pushkinʼ). It is shown that the initial cause of both phenomena is social. It consists in strengthening the internal migration of the Russian population, as well as in the widespread dissemination of the media. As a result, the language community begins to consist of such native speakers who previously lived in different regions of the country or belonged to different social groups and therefore have mismatched background knowledge. The inability to rely on the knowledge of the recipients forces senders of messages, firstly, to avoid using am- biguous case forms (for example, when following the old norm in the sentence Ya zhivu v Pushkine, it remains unclear what the initial form of the toponym is: Pushkin or Pushkino), and secondly, to avoid using idiomatic toponymic models, since they do not make it possible to determine from which word the toponym is derived (the modern non-idiomatic toponym ulitsa Akademika Komarova (ʻStreet of Academician Komarovʼ) is much more unambiguous than the toponyms Komarovskaya ulitsa (ʻKomarovskaya Streetʼ) or ulitsa Komarovka (ʻKomarovka Streetʼ) built according to the old model).

The article attempts to establish a connection between the linguistic theories of F.F. Fortunatov and A.A. Potebnya. It is known that in nouns that name people and animals important to humans, the grammatical meanings of gender indicate their biological sex. As for the nouns that name inanimate objects, as well as some other animals, their grammatical meanings of gender for quite a long time were estimated by linguists as relics of an ancient form of thinking incomprehensible to modern people. However, if we consider the grammatical meanings of gender as a component of the inner form of the word, it becomes clear that when creating words, the meanings of the masculine gender were used to indicate the presence of such properties in objects that are inherent in male beings, such as their relatively greater activity, larger size, greater strength and greater independence. In turn, feminine grammatical meanings reflected the absence of these properties. The article emphasizes the similarity between the grammatical meanings of gender of nouns and the inner forms of words in their traditional lexicological understanding: (1) in different languages, the names of the same objects can have different grammatical gender meanings, (2) at the time of the appearance of a word, its inner form indicate the connection between the word and its lexical meaning, but over time inner forms can be obscured or lost, (3) like the traditional inner forms, the grammatical meanings of gender can either represent one of the components of the lexical meaning of the word, or may be part of its connotations.