The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the Early Middle Ages, which in turn is thought to have descended from the earlier Proto-Balto-Slavic language, linking the Slavic languages to the Baltic languages in a Balto-Slavic group within the Indo-European family.
The current geographical distribution of natively spoken Slavic languages includes the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe, and all the way from Western Siberia to the Russian Far East. Furthermore, the diasporas of many Slavic peoples have established isolated minorities of speakers of their languages all over the world. The number of speakers of all Slavic languages together was estimated to be 315 million at the turn of the twenty-first century. It is the largest ethno-linguistic group in Europe and is highly diverse.
The Slavic languages are conventionally (that is, also on the basis of extralinguistic features, such as geography) divided into three subgroups: East, South, and West, which together constitute more than 20 languages. Of these, 10 have at least one million speakers and official status as the national languages of the countries in which they are predominantly spoken: Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian (of the East group), Polish, Czech and Slovak (of the West group), Bulgarian and Macedonian (eastern members of the South group), and Serbo-Croatian and Slovene (western members of the South group). In addition, Aleksandr Dulichenko recognizes a number of Slavic microlanguages: both isolated ethnolects and peripheral dialects of more well-established Slavic languages.
Most Slavic languages are highly inflectional. Nouns usually decline for case, gender, and number; verbs could conjugate for person, gender, tense, aspect, etc. Slavic languages generally have three grammatical genders masculine, feminine, and neuter. For animals, the masculine and feminine genders roughly correspond to biological genders; nouns referring to humans are almost never neuter. Most modern Slavic languages have two numbers singular and plural, with some inheriting an old dual number. A minority of Slavic languages decline nouns for definiteness.
Slavic languages typically have flexible word order. The unmarked word order is usually subject–verb–object.
Branches
Since the interwar period, scholars have conventionally divided Slavic languages, on the basis of geographical and genealogical principle, and with the use of the extralinguistic feature of script, into three main branches, that is, East, South, and West (from the vantage of linguistic features alone, there are only two branches of the Slavic languages, namely North and South). These three conventional branches feature some of the following sub-branches:
Slavic East Slavic Belarusian Russian Rusyn (often seen as a dialect of Ukrainian) Ukrainian Podlachian (often seen as a dialect of Ukrainian) West Polesian (often seen as a dialect of Ukrainian) South Slavic Eastern South Slavic Bulgarian Macedonian Old Church Slavonic
Serbo-Croatian Serbian Croatian Bosnian Montenegrin Slovene West Slavic Czech–Slovak Czech Slovak Lechitic Polabian Polish Pomeranian Kashubian Slovincian (often seen as a dialect of Kashubian) Silesian (sometimes seen as a dialect of Polish) Sorbian Lower Sorbian Upper Sorbian
Some linguists speculate that a North Slavic branch has existed as well. The Old Novgorod dialect may have reflected some idiosyncrasies of this group.
Slavic languages diverged from a common proto-language later than any other groups of the Indo-European language family, and enough differences exist between the any two geographically distant Slavic languages to make spoken communication between such speakers cumbersome. As usually found within other language groups, mutual intelligibility between Slavic languages is better for geographically adjacent languages and in the written (rather than oral) form.Fesenmeier, L., Heinemann, S., & Vicario, F. (2014). "The mutual intelligibility of Slavic languages as a source of support for the revival of the Sorbian language" [Sprachminderheiten: gestern, heute, morgen- Minoranze linguistiche: ieri, oggi, domani]. In Language minorities: yesterday, today, tomorrow. Peter Lang. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-653-04817-9/11Fischer, A., Jágrová, K., Stenger, I., Avgustinova, T., Klakow, D., & Marti, R. (2016). Orthographic and morphological correspondences between related Slavic languages as a base for modeling of mutual intelligibility. 10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2016.Fischer, A. K., Jagrova, K., Stenger, I., Avgustinova, T., Klakow, D., & Marti, R. (2016, 2016/05/01). LREC - Orthographic and Morphological Correspondences between Related Slavic Languages as a Base for Modeling of Mutual Intelligibility.Golubović, J. (2016). "Mutual intelligibility in the Slavic language area". Dissertation in Linguistics, 152. https://www.narcis.nl/publication/RecordID/oai%3Apure.rug.nl%3Apublications%2F19c19b5b-a43e-47bf-af6e-f68c0713342b; https://research.rug.nl/en/publications/mutual-intelligibility-in-the-slavic-language-area ; https://www.rug.nl/research/portal/files/31880568/Title_and_contents_.pdf ; https://lens.org/000-445-299-792-024Golubovic, J., & Gooskens, C. (2015). "Mutual intelligibility between West and South Slavic languages". Russian Linguistics, 39(3), 351-373. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-015-9150-9Kyjánek, L., & Haviger, J. (2019). "The Measurement of Mutual Intelligibility between West-Slavic Languages" [Article]. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 26(3), 205-230. https://doi.org/10.1080/09296174.2018.1464546Lindsay, R. (2014). "Mutual intelligibility of languages in the Slavic family". Academia. Stenger, I., Avgustinova, T., & Marti, R. (2017). "Levenshtein distance and word adaptation surprisal as methods of measuring mutual intelligibility in reading comprehension of Slavic languages". Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies: International Conference 'Dialogue 2017' Proceedings, 16, 304-317. https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85021828413&partnerID=40&md5=c9a8557c3da885eb1be39898bfacf6e4 Recent studies of mutual intelligibility between Slavic languages have said, that their traditional three-branch division does not withstand quantitative scrutiny.Golubović, J., Gooskens, C. (2015). "Mutual intelligibility between West and South Slavic languages" [Article]. Russian Linguistics, 39(3), 351-373. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-015-9150-9 While the grouping of Czech, Slovak and Polish into West Slavic turned out to be appropriate, Western South Slavic Serbo-Croatian and Slovene were found to be closer to Czech and Slovak (West Slavic languages) than to Eastern South Slavic Bulgarian.
The traditional tripartite division of the Slavic languages does not take into account the spoken dialects of each language. In certain cases transitional dialects and hybrid dialects often bridge the gaps between different languages, showing similarities that do not stand out when comparing Slavic literary (i.e. standard) languages. For example, Slovak (West Slavic) and Ukrainian (East Slavic) are bridged by the Rusyn language spoken in Transcarpatian Ukraine and adjacent counties of Slovakia and Ukraine.
Modern Russian differs from other Slavic languages in an unusually high percentage of words of non-Slavic origin, particularly of Dutch (e.g. for naval terms introduced during the reign of Peter I), French (for household and culinary terms during the reign of Catherine II) and German (for medical, scientific and military terminology in the mid-1800s).
Another difference between the East, South, and West Slavic branches is in the orthography of the standard languages: West Slavic languages (and Western South Slavic languages – Croatian and Slovene) are written in the Latin script, and have had more Western European influence due to their proximity and speakers being historically Roman Catholic, whereas the East Slavic and Eastern South Slavic languages are written in Cyrillic and, with Eastern Orthodox or Eastern-Catholic faith, have had more Greek influence. Two Slavic languages, Belarusian and Serbo-Croatian, are biscriptal, i.e. written in either alphabet either presently or in a recent past.
History
Common roots and ancestry
Slavic languages descend from their reconstructed ancestor Proto-Slavic, ultimately deriving from Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor language of all Indo-European languages, via a Proto-Balto-Slavic stage. During the Proto-Balto-Slavic period, a number of exclusive isoglosses in phonology, morphology, lexis, and syntax developed, which sets the Balto-Slavic branch apart from other branches of the Indo-European family. The divergence of Slavic and Baltic is estimated with glottochronology archaeological evidences at around 15001000 BCE.
In the early 20th century, some historical linguistics have challenged the Balto-Slavic model. They attempted to explain the similarities of the two families with areal contact. However, later advances in the field found firm evidence that rejected this opposition and supported a stage of Balto-Slavic unity. This evidence include shared sound changes, shared core lexicon, and common grammatical innovations. The precise nature of this Balto-Slavic unity is still debated, some scholars believe that internal variations existed in this common stage.
Divergence The prehistoric Slavic speakers likely migrated into the Eastern Roman Empire at around the 6th century CE. The first historical accounts of the Slav ethnicity was found around this time. Paired with hydronym evidences, this places the Proto-Slavic speakers around the Dnipro river basin.
In the earliest stage of Proto-Slavic, no dialectal differences could be reconstructed via the comparative method. It has been suggested that the rapid expansion the early history of Slavic is at a rate much greater than natural population growth can account for, which leads some to believe that Slavic was used as a lingua franca in the Avars region. This theory also coincides with the apparent homogeneity of the Proto-Slavic language.
The Slavic languages are traditionally divided into East, West, and South Slavic groups. However, the divergence process between these three groups are not strictly linear, and the borders are not without ambiguity. The divergence of Proto-Slavic begin at around the 7th century, likely caused by the rapid expansion of the Slavic-speaking area, which rendered contact between the three groups infrequent. By some analysis, East Slavic shared marginally more isoglosses with South Slavic than with West Slavic.
Written documents of the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries already display some local linguistic features. For example, the Freising manuscripts show a language that contains some phonetic and lexical elements peculiar to Slovene dialects (e.g. rhotacism, the word krilatec). The Freising manuscripts are the first Latin-script continuous text in a Slavic language.
The migration of Slavic speakers into the Balkans in the declining centuries of the Byzantine Empire expanded the area of Slavic speech, but the pre-existing writing (notably Greek) survived in this area. The arrival of the Hungarians in Pannonia in the 9th century interposed non-Slavic speakers between South and West Slavs. Frankish conquests completed the geographical separation between these two groups, also severing the connection between Slavs in Moravia and Lower Austria (Moravians) and those in present-day Styria, Carinthia, East Tyrol in Austria, and in the provinces of modern Slovenia, where the ancestors of the Slovenes settled during first colonization.