| Slavic | |
| Also Known As: | Slavonic |
| Region: | Throughout Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Europe, plus Central Asia and North Asia (Siberia) |
| Speakers: | 315 million |
| Date: | 2001 |
| Ethnicity: | Slavs |
| Familycolor: | Indo-European |
| Fam2: | Balto-Slavic |
| Protoname: | Proto-Slavic |
| Child1: | East Slavic |
| Child2: | South Slavic |
| Child3: | West Slavic |
| Iso2: | sla |
| Iso5: | sla |
| Lingua: | 53 (phylozone) |
| Glotto: | slav1255 |
| Glottorefname: | Slavic |
| Map: | Slavic europe.svg |
| Mapcaption: | Political map of Europe with countries where a Slavic language is a national language. |
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 Slavic languages are conventionally (that is, also on the basis of extralinguistic features) 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.
Slavic languages are highly fusional and, with some exceptions, have richly developed inflection and cases. The word order of the Slavic languages is mostly free.
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.
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:
Some linguists speculate that a North Slavic branch has existed as well. The Old Novgorod dialect may have reflected some idiosyncrasies of this group.
Mutual intelligibility also plays a role in determining the West, East, and South branches. Speakers of languages within the same branch will in most cases be able to understand each other at least partially, but they are generally unable to across branches (which would be comparable to a native English speaker trying to understand any other Germanic language besides Scots).
The most obvious differences between the East, South, and West Slavic branches are 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 Uniate faith, have had more Greek influence. Two Slavic languages, Belarusian and Serbian, are biscriptal, commonly written in either alphabet. East Slavic languages such as Russian have, however, during and after Peter the Great's Europeanization campaign, absorbed many words of Latin, French, German, and Italian origin.
The tripartite division of the Slavic languages does not take into account the spoken dialects of each language. Of these, certain so-called 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/dialect of Eastern Slovakia and Western Ukraine. Similarly, the Croatian Kajkavian dialect is more similar to Slovene than to the standard Croatian language.
Although the Slavic languages diverged from a common proto-language later than any other groups of the Indo-European language family, enough differences exist between the various Slavic dialects and languages to make communication between speakers of different Slavic languages difficult. Within the individual Slavic languages, dialects may vary to a lesser degree, as those of Russian, or to a much greater degree, like those of Slovene.
See main article: History of the Slavic languages.
See also: Proto-Slavic language, History of Proto-Slavic and Proto-Balto-Slavic language.
Slavic languages descend from Proto-Slavic, their immediate parent language, 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 makes Slavic and Baltic the closest related of all the Indo-European branches. The secession of the Balto-Slavic dialect ancestral to Proto-Slavic is estimated on archaeological and glottochronological criteria to have occurred sometime in the period 1500–1000 BCE.
A minority of Baltists maintain the view that the Slavic group of languages differs so radically from the neighboring Baltic group (Lithuanian, Latvian, and the now-extinct Old Prussian), that they could not have shared a parent language after the breakup of the Proto-Indo-European continuum about five millennia ago. Substantial advances in Balto-Slavic accentology that occurred in the last three decades, however, make this view very hard to maintain nowadays, especially when one considers that there was most likely no "Proto-Baltic" language and that West Baltic and East Baltic differ from each other as much as each of them does from Proto-Slavic.
The Proto-Slavic language existed until around AD 500. By the 7th century, it had broken apart into large dialectal zones.
There are no reliable hypotheses about the nature of the subsequent breakups of West and South Slavic. East Slavic is generally thought to converge to one Old East Slavic language, which existed until at least the 12th century.
Linguistic differentiation was accelerated by the dispersion of the Slavic peoples over a large territory, which in Central Europe exceeded the current extent of Slavic-speaking majorities. 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 colonisation.
In September 2015, Alexei Kassian and Anna Dybo published, as a part of interdisciplinary study of Slavic ethnogenesis, a lexicostatistical classification of Slavic languages. It was built using qualitative 110-word Swadesh lists that were compiled according to the standards of the Global Lexicostatistical Database project and processed using modern phylogenetic algorithms.
The resulting dated tree complies with the traditional expert views on the Slavic group structure. Kassian-Dybo's tree suggests that Proto-Slavic first diverged into three branches: Eastern, Western and Southern. The Proto-Slavic break-up is dated to around 100 A.D., which correlates with the archaeological assessment of Slavic population in the early 1st millennium A.D. being spread on a large territory and already not being monolithic. Then, in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., these three Slavic branches almost simultaneously divided into sub-branches, which corresponds to the fast spread of the Slavs through Eastern Europe and the Balkans during the second half of the 1st millennium A.D. (the so-called Slavicization of Europe).
The Slovenian language was excluded from the analysis, as both Ljubljana koine and Literary Slovenian show mixed lexical features of Southern and Western Slavic languages (which could possibly indicate the Western Slavic origin of Slovenian, which for a long time was being influenced on the part of the neighboring Serbo-Croatian dialects), and the quality Swadesh lists were not yet collected for Slovenian dialects. Because of scarcity or unreliability of data, the study also did not cover the so-called Old Novgordian dialect, the Polabian language and some other Slavic lects.
The above Kassian-Dybo's research did not take into account the findings by Russian linguist Andrey Zaliznyak who stated that, until the 14th or 15th century, major language differences were not between the regions occupied by modern Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, but rather between the north-west (around modern Velikiy Novgorod and Pskov) and the center (around modern Kyiv, Suzdal, Rostov, Moscow as well as Belarus) of the East Slavic territories. The Old Novgorodian dialect of that time differed from the central East Slavic dialects as well as from all other Slavic languages much more than in later centuries. According to Zaliznyak, the Russian language developed as a convergence of that dialect and the central ones, whereas Ukrainian and Belarusian were continuation of development of the central dialects of East Slavs.
Also Russian linguist Sergey Nikolaev, analysing historical development of Slavic dialects' accent system, concluded that a number of other tribes in Kievan Rus came from different Slavic branches and spoke distant Slavic dialects.
Zaliznyak and Nikolaev's points mean that there was a convergence stage before the divergence or simultaneously, which was not taken into consideration by Kassian-Dybo's research.
Ukrainian linguists (Stepan Smal-Stotsky, Ivan Ohienko, George Shevelov, Yevhen Tymchenko, Vsevolod Hantsov, Olena Kurylo) deny the existence of a common Old East Slavic language at any time in the past. According to them, the dialects of East Slavic tribes evolved gradually from the common Proto-Slavic language without any intermediate stages.
See also: Proto-Slavic.
The following is a summary of the main changes from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) leading up to the Common Slavic (CS) period immediately following the Proto-Slavic language (PS).
The Slavic languages are a relatively homogeneous family, compared with other families of Indo-European languages (e.g. Germanic, Romance, and Indo-Iranian). As late as the 10th century AD, the entire Slavic-speaking area still functioned as a single, dialectally differentiated language, termed Common Slavic. Compared with most other Indo-European languages, the Slavic languages are quite conservative, particularly in terms of morphology (the means of inflecting nouns and verbs to indicate grammatical differences). Most Slavic languages have a rich, fusional morphology that conserves much of the inflectional morphology of Proto-Indo-European. The vocabulary of the Slavic languages is also of Indo-European origin. Many of its elements, which do not find exact matches in the ancient Indo-European languages, are associated with the Balto-Slavic community.
The following table shows the inventory of consonants of Late Common Slavic:
| Labial | Coronal | Palatal | Velar | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| Plosive | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |
| Affricate | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| Fricative | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/, (pronounced as /link/1) | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||
| Trill | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||
| Lateral | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||
| Approximant | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||
1The sound pronounced as //sʲ// did not occur in West Slavic, where it had developed to pronounced as //ʃ//.
This inventory of sounds is quite similar to what is found in most modern Slavic languages. The extensive series of palatal consonants, along with the affricates *ts and *dz, developed through a series of palatalizations that happened during the Proto-Slavic period, from earlier sequences either of velar consonants followed by front vowels (e.g. *ke, *ki, *ge, *gi, *xe, and *xi), or of various consonants followed by *j (e.g. *tj, *dj, *sj, *zj, *rj, *lj, *kj, and *gj, where *j is the palatal approximant (pronounced as /[j]/, the sound of the English letter "y" in "yes" or "you").
The biggest change in this inventory results from a further general palatalization occurring near the end of the Common Slavic period, where all consonants became palatalized before front vowels. This produced a large number of new palatalized (or "soft") sounds, which formed pairs with the corresponding non-palatalized (or "hard") consonants and absorbed the existing palatalized sounds pronounced as /link/. These sounds were best preserved in Russian but were lost to varying degrees in other languages (particularly Czech and Slovak). The following table shows the inventory of modern Russian:
| Labial | Dental & Alveolar | Post- alveolar/ Palatal | Velar | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| hard | soft | hard | soft | hard | soft | hard | soft | ||
| Nasal | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||
| Stop | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | |||
| Affricate | pronounced as /link/ | (pronounced as /link/) | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| Fricative | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |
| Trill | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||
| Approximant | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
This general process of palatalization did not occur in Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian. As a result, the modern consonant inventory of these languages is nearly identical to the Late Common Slavic inventory.
Late Common Slavic tolerated relatively few consonant clusters. However, as a result of the loss of certain formerly present vowels (the weak yers),
A typical vowel inventory is as follows:
| Front | Central | Back | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Close | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |
| Mid | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||
| Open | pronounced as /link/ |
The sound pronounced as /link/ occurs only in some languages (e.g. Russian and Belarusian), and even in these languages, it is often unclear whether it is its own phoneme or an allophone of /i/. Nonetheless, it is a quite prominent and noticeable characteristic of the languages in which it is present.
Common Slavic also had two nasal vowels: *ę pronounced as /link/ and *ǫ pronounced as /link/. However, these are preserved only in modern Polish (along with a few lesser-known dialects and microlanguages; see Yus for more details).
Other phonemic vowels are found in certain languages (e.g. the schwa pronounced as //ə// in Bulgarian and Slovenian, distinct high-mid and low-mid vowels in Slovenian, and the lax front vowel pronounced as //ɪ// in Ukrainian).
An area of great difference among Slavic languages is that of prosody (i.e. syllabic distinctions such as vowel length, accent, and tone). Common Slavic had a complex system of prosody, inherited with little change from Proto-Indo-European. This consisted of phonemic vowel length and a free, mobile pitch accent:
The modern languages vary greatly in the extent to which they preserve this system. On one extreme, Serbo-Croatian preserves the system nearly unchanged (even more so in the conservative Chakavian dialect); on the other, Macedonian has basically lost the system in its entirety. Between them are found numerous variations:
Similarly, Slavic languages have extensive morphophonemic alternations in their derivational and inflectional morphology, including between velar and postalveolar consonants, front and back vowels, and a vowel and no vowel.
See main article: Slavic vocabulary. The following is a very brief selection of cognates in basic vocabulary across the Slavic language family, which may serve to give an idea of the sound changes involved. This is not a list of translations: cognates have a common origin, but their meaning may be shifted and loanwords may have replaced them.
| Proto-Slavic | Russian | Ukrainian | Belarusian | Rusyn | Polish | Czech | Slovak | Slovene | Serbo-Croatian | Bulgarian | Macedonian | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Slavic languages: *uxo (ear) | Russian: ухо | Ukrainian: вухо | Belarusian: вуха | ухо | Polish: ucho | Czech: ucho | Slovak: ucho | Slovenian: uho | Serbian: уво / (Serbia only) ухо / (Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia) | Bulgarian: ухо | Macedonian: уво | |
| Slavic languages: *ognь (fire) | Russian: огонь | Ukrainian: вогонь | Belarusian: агонь | огинь (ohénʹ) | Polish: ogień | Czech: oheň | Slovak: oheň | Slovenian: ogenj | огањ / | Bulgarian: огън | Macedonian: оган/Macedonian: огин (/) | |
| Slavic languages: *ryba (fish) | Russian: рыба | Ukrainian: риба | Belarusian: рыба | рыба | Polish: ryba | Czech: ryba | Slovak: ryba | Slovenian: riba | риба / | Bulgarian: риба | Macedonian: риба | |
| Slavic languages: *gnězdo (nest) | Russian: гнездо | Ukrainian: гнiздо | Belarusian: гняздо | гнïздо | Polish: gniazdo | Czech: hnízdo | Slovak: hniezdo | Slovenian: gnezdo | гнездо / (ek.) гнијездо / (ijek.) гниздо / (ik.) | Bulgarian: гнездо | Macedonian: гнездо | |
| Slavic languages: *oko (eye) | Russian: око (dated, poetic or in set expressions) modern: Russian: глаз | Ukrainian: око | Belarusian: вока | око | Polish: oko | Czech: oko | Slovak: oko | Slovenian: oko | око / | Bulgarian: око | Macedonian: око | |
| Slavic languages: *golva (head) | Russian: голова Russian: глава "chapter or chief, leader, head" | Ukrainian: голова | Belarusian: галава | голова | Polish: głowa | Czech: hlava | Slovak: hlava | Slovenian: glava | глава / | Bulgarian: глава | Macedonian: глава | |
| Slavic languages: *rǫka (hand) | Russian: рука | Ukrainian: рука | Belarusian: рука | рука | Polish: ręka | Czech: ruka | Slovak: ruka | Slovenian: roka | рука / | Bulgarian: ръка | Macedonian: рака | |
| Slavic languages: *noktь (night) | Russian: ночь | Ukrainian: ніч | Belarusian: ноч | нуч | Polish: noc | Czech: noc | Slovak: noc | Slovenian: noč | ноћ / | Bulgarian: нощ | Macedonian: ноќ |
See main article: Slavicism. Most languages of the former Soviet Union and of some neighbouring countries (for example, Mongolian) are significantly influenced by Russian, especially in vocabulary. The Romanian, Albanian, and Hungarian languages show the influence of the neighboring Slavic nations, especially in vocabulary pertaining to urban life, agriculture, and crafts and trade—the major cultural innovations at times of limited long-range cultural contact. In each one of these languages, Slavic lexical borrowings represent at least 15% of the total vocabulary. This is potentially because Slavic tribes crossed and partially settled the territories inhabited by ancient Illyrians and Vlachs on their way to the Balkans.
Max Vasmer, a specialist in Slavic etymology, has claimed that there were no Slavic loans into Proto-Germanic. However, there are isolated Slavic loans (mostly recent) into other Germanic languages. For example, the word for "border" (in modern German German: Grenze, Dutch Dutch; Flemish: grens) was borrowed from the Common Slavic Slavic languages: granica. There are, however, many cities and villages of Slavic origin in Eastern Germany, the largest of which are Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden. English derives quark (a kind of cheese and subatomic particle) from the German German: Quark, which in turn is derived from the Slavic Slavic languages: tvarog, which means "curd". Many German surnames, particularly in Eastern Germany and Austria, are Slavic in origin. The Nordic languages also have Swedish: torg/torv (market place) from Old Russian tъrgъ or Polish Polish: targ, Swedish: humle (hops),Swedish: räka/reke/reje (shrimp, prawn),and, via Middle Low German Swedish: tolk (interpreter) from Old Slavic Slavic languages: tlŭkŭ, and Swedish: pråm/pram (barge) from West Slavonic pramŭ.
Finnic and Slavic languages have many words in common. According to Petri Kallio, this suggests Slavic words being borrowed into Finnish languages, as early as Proto-Finnic. Many loanwords have acquired a Finnicized form, making it difficult to say whether such a word is natively Finnic or Slavic.
The Czech word Czech: [[wikt:robot|robot]] is now found in most languages worldwide, and the word pistol, probably also from Czech, is found in many European languages.
A well-known Slavic word in almost all European languages is vodka, a borrowing from Russian Russian: водка, from common Slavic Slavic languages: voda ('water', cognate to the English word water) with the diminutive ending Slavic languages: -ka. Owing to the medieval fur trade with Northern Russia, Pan-European loans from Russian include such familiar words as sable. The English word "vampire" was borrowed (perhaps via French French: vampire) from German German: Vampir, in turn derived from Serbo-Croatian вампир, continuing Proto-Slavic Slavic languages: *ǫpyrь, although Polish scholar K. Stachowski has argued that the origin of the word is early Slavic Slavic languages: *vąpěrь, going back to Turkic oobyr.
Several European languages, including English, have borrowed the word [[polje]] (meaning 'large, flat plain') directly from the former Yugoslav languages (i.e. Slovene and Serbo-Croatian). During the heyday of the USSR in the 20th century, many more Russian words became known worldwide:, Soviet,,,,, etc. Another borrowed Russian term is .
The following tree for the Slavic languages derives from the Ethnologue report for Slavic languages. It includes the ISO 639-1 and ISO 639-3 codes where available.
Para- and supranational languages