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Literary Tshyak is based on Old Tshyak but after Old Tshyak had become a dead language, akin to Late Latin, Classical Arabic, Literary Chinese, Church Slavonic, etc. While much popular literature was composed in Middle Tshyak, a large amount of (often more serious) literature was composed in Literary Tshyak.

Literary Tshyak attempted to emulate Old Tshyak but often showed influence from later varieties of Tshyak such as Middle Tshyak. Examples of such influence included:

• Adopting the Tshyak pronunciation of the day, except for not losing posttonic syllables, when read aloud
• Adopting Middle Tshyak register
• Adopting Middle Tshyak definiteness/number marking for animate nouns
• Adopting Middle Tshyak pronouns
• Adopting Middle Tshyak evidential, egophoricity, and mirativity marking
• Adopting Middle Tshyak compounds
• Sometimes adopting Middle Tshyak perfectivity marking (e.g. if a writer forgot what the Old Tshyak member of a perfective/imperfective pair that was lost in Middle Tshyak was)

It tends to retain the following:

• Posttonic syllables in pronunciation when read aloud
• Verb inflection
• Word order

It tends to lack the following:

• Analytic verbal constructions, aside from the serial verbs and compound verbs inherited from Old Tshyak
• Non-possessive first and second person pronouns when despective or honorific ones are not being used