Slavic languages

Slavic
Geographic distribution	throughout Eastern Europe
Linguistic classification	Indo-European Slavic
Subdivisions	East Slavic South Slavic West Slavic
Language codes
ISO 639-2 / 5	sla

  Countries where a West Slavic language is the national language

  Countries where an East Slavic language is the national language

  Countries where a South Slavic language is the national language

The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages), a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia.

Branches

Scholars divide the Slavic languages into three main branches, some of which feature sub-branches:

• East Slavic, including Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Rusyn
• West Slavic, which further subdivide into:
  • Czech and Slovak,
  • Upper and Lower Sorbian (minority languages in Germany),

Italian

• • Lechitic languages: Polish , Pomeranian/Kashubian and extinct Polabian.
• South Slavic, which further subdivide into:
  • Western subgroup composed of Slovenian and the Serbo-Croatian group (Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian; they are mutually intelligible), Croatian-chakavian,Croatian-kajkavian
  • Eastern subgroup composed of Standard Bulgarian and Macedonian (mutually intelligible languages).
    • The oldest Slavic literary language was Old Church Slavonic, of which Church Slavonic is a later scion.

Some linguists speculate that a North Slavic branch has existed as well. The Old Novgorod dialect of Old Russian may have reflected some idiosyncrasies of this group. On the other hand, the term "North Slavic" is also used sometimes to combine the West and East Slavic languages into one group, in opposition to the South Slavic languages.

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.

Although the Slavic languages split from a common proto-language later than any other group 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, as those of Slovenian.

A secondary division between the Slavic languages may be made between "G-Slavic" and "H-Slavic", based upon whether or not the proto-Slavic g in words such as gora ("mountain") is changed to h (hora) or not in the language's standard form. The G-Slavic languages would include Polish, Russian, and the South Slavic languages, whereas Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, and Belarusian are H-Slavic.

History

Common roots and ancestry

All Slavic languages are descendants of Proto-Slavic, their parent language.

Mainstream historical linguistics (Oswald Szemerényi, August Schleicher) postulate that Proto-Slavic in turn developed from the Proto-Balto-Slavic language, a common ancestor of Proto-Baltic, the parent of the Baltic languages. According to this theory, the "Urheimat" of Proto-Balto-Slavic lay in the territories surrounding today's Lithuania at some time after the Indo-European language community had separated into different dialect regions (c. 3000 BC). Slavic and Baltic speakers share at least 289 words which could have come from that hypothetical language. The process of separation of Proto-Slavic speakers from Proto-Baltic speakers presumably occurred around 1000 BC.

Some linguists in the Baltic countries traditionally maintain 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.

Evolution of Slavic languages

14th-century Novgorodian children were literate enough to send each other letters written on birch bark

The imposition of Church Slavonic on Orthodox Slavs was often at the expense of the vernacular. Says W.B. Lockwood, a prominent Indo-European linguist: "It [O.C.S] remained in use to modern times, but was more and more influenced by the living, evolving languages, so that one distinguishes Bulgarian, Serbian, and Russian varieties. The use of such media hampered the development of the local languages for literary purposes and when they do appear the first attempts are usually in an artificially mixed style." (148) Lockwood also notes that these languages have "enriched" themselves by drawing on Church Slavonic for the vocabulary of abstract concepts. The situation in the Catholic countries, where Latin was more important, was different. The Polish Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski and the Croatian Baroque writers of sixteenth century all wrote in their respective vernaculars (though Polish itself had drawn amply on Latin in the same way Russian would eventually draw on Church Slavonic).

Although the Church Slavonic language hampered vernacular literatures, it nonetheless fostered Slavonic literary activity and abetted linguistic independence from external influences. The languages of the Catholic Slavs tottered precariously near extinction on many occasions. The earliest Polish is attested in the fourteenth century; before then, the language of administration was Latin. Czech was always in danger of giving way to German, and Czech's relatives Upper and Lower Sorbian, spoken only in Germany, have nearly succumbed just recently. Under German and Italian influence for many centuries, the Slovene language was a regional language spoken by peasants, and was brought to written standards only by the followers of the Reformation in the 16th century. Only the Croatian vernacular literary tradition nearly matches Church Slavonic in age. It began with the Vinodol Codex and continued through the Renaissance until the codifications of Serbo-Croatian in 1850, though much of the literature between 1300 and 1500 was written in much the same mixture of the vernacular and Church Slavonic as prevailed in Russia and elsewhere. The independence of Ragusa facilitated the continuity of the tradition.

More recent foreign influences follow the same general pattern in Slavic languages as elsewhere, and are governed by the political relationships of the Slavs. In the seventeenth century, bourgeois Russian (delovoi jazyk) absorbed German words through direct contacts between Russians and communities of German settlers in Russia. In the Petrovian era, close contacts with France invited countless loans and calques from French, a significant fraction of which not only survived, but replaced older Slavonic loans. Russian, in turn, influenced most literary Slavic languages by one means or another in the nineteenth century. Croatian writers borrowed Czech words liberally, whereas Czech writers, scrambling to revive their dying language, had in turn borrowed many words (cf. vzduch, air) from Russian. A more direct role for Russian came vis-a-vis Bulgarian, where Russian words were imported en-masse to replace Turkish and Greek loans, so that many Bulgarian words now carry a Russian phonetic footnote (i.e., have a phonetic structure unusual for the Bulgarian language or, indeed, the South Slavic languages in general).

Separation of South and West Slavs

The movement of Slavic-speakers into the Balkans in the declining centuries of the Byzantine empire expanded the area of Slavic speech, but pre-existing languages (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, severing the connection between Slavs in Lower Austria (Moravians) from ancestors of present-day Slovenians in Styria, Carinthia, East Tyrol and southern Slovenia provinces.

Differentiation of Slavic languages

The Proto-Slavic language existed approximately to the middle of the first millennium AD. By the 7th century, it had broken apart into large dialectal zones.

There are no reliable hypotheses about the nature of the subsequent breakup of West and South Slavic. East Slavic is generally thought to converge to one Old Russian language, which existed until at least the twelfth century. It is now believed that South Slavs came to the Balkans in two streams, and that between them was a large non-Slavic population of Vlachs.

Linguistic differentiation received impetus from the dispersion of the Slavic peoples over large territory - which in Central Europe exceeded the current extent of Slavic-speaking majorities. Written documents of the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries already have some local linguistic features. For example the Freising monuments show a language which contains some phonetic and lexical elements peculiar to Slovenian dialects (e.g. rhotacism, the word krilatec).

The movement of Slavic-speakers into the Balkans in the declining centuries of the Byzantine empire expanded the area of Slavic speech, but pre-existing languages (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, severing the connection between Slavs in Moravia and Lower Austria (Moravians) from those in present-day Styria, Carinthia, East Tyrol in Austria and in the provinces of modern Slovenia, where ancestor of Slovenians settled during first colonisation.

Common features

• fusional morphology; (a property of conservative Indo-European languages)
• preservation of Proto-Indo-European noun case system - most Slavic languages have seven cases;
• differentiation between perfective and imperfective aspect of verbs
• large inventories of consonants (especially sibilants);
• phonemic palatalization;
• complex consonant clusters, as in Russian встреча" "meeting" or Polish bezwzględny "absolute".

Slavic influence on neighbouring languages

Most languages of the former Soviet Union, Russia and neighbouring countries (for example, Mongolian) are significantly influenced by Russian, especially in vocabulary. In the west, the Romanian and Hungarian languages witness the influence of the neighbouring Slavic nations, especially in the vocabulary pertaining to crafts and trade; the major cultural innovations at times when few long-range cultural contacts took place.

Despite a comparable extent of historical proximity, the Germanic languages show no significant Slavic influence. Max Vasmer has observed that there are no Slavic loans into Common Germanic, for instance. The only Germanic language that shows significant Slavic influence is Yiddish. There are isolated Slavic loans into other Germanic languages as well. An example of a Slavic loan in Germanic languages is the word for "border", modern German Grenze, Dutch grens from the Common Slavic *granica. English derives quark (a kind of cheese, not the subatomic particle) from the German Quark, which in turn is derived from the Slavic tvarog, which means "curd". Swedish also has torg (market place) from Old Russian tŭrgŭ, tolk (interpreter) from Old Slavic tlŭkŭ, and pråm (barge) from West Slavonic pramŭ.

Robot is now found in many languages worldwide.

A well known Slavic word in almost all European languages is vodka, a borrowing from Polish wódka (pronounced /vutka/) or Russian водка. Lit. "little water", from common Slavic voda , (water, cognate to English word) with the diminutive ending -ka. Owing to medieval fur trade with Northern Russia, Pan-European loans from Russian include such familiar words as sable. and hamster. The English word vampire was borrowed (perhaps via French vampire) from German Vampir, in turn borrowed in early 18th century from Serbian вампир/vampir.

Detailed list with ISO 639 and SIL codes

The following tree for the Slavic languages derives from the Ethnologue report for Slavic languages. It includes the ISO 639-1 and ISO 639-2 codes where available as well as the SIL. ISO 639-2 uses the code sla in a general way for Slavic languages not included in one of the other codes.

East Slavic languages:

• Belarusian (alternatively Belarusan, Belarussian, Belorussian) - (ISO 639-1 code: be; ISO 639-2 code: bel;SIL code: bel)
• Ukrainian - (ISO 639-1 code: uk; ISO 639-2 code: ukr; SIL code: ukr)
• Russian - (ISO 639-1 code: ru; ISO 639-2 code, rus; SIL code: rus)
• Rusyn - (ISO 639-2 code: sla; SIL code: rue)

West Slavic languages:

• Sorbian section (also known as Wendish) - ISO 639-2 code: wen
  • Lower Sorbian (also known as Lusatian) - (ISO 639-2 code: dsb; SIL code: dsb)
  • Upper Sorbian - (ISO 639-2 code: hsb; SIL code: hsb)
• Lechitic section
  • Polish - (ISO 639-1 code, pl; ISO 639-2 code, pol; SIL code: pol)
  • Pomeranian
    • Kashubian - (ISO 639-2 code: csb; SIL code: csb)
    • Slovincian - extinct
  • Polabian - extinct - (ISO 639-2 code: sla; SIL code: pox)
• Czech-Slovak section
  • Czech - (ISO 639-1 code: cs; ISO 639-2(B) code, cze; ISO 639-2(T) code: ces; SIL code: ces)
  • Knaanic or Judeo Slavic - extinct - (ISO 639-2 code: sla; SIL code: czk)
  • Slovak - (ISO 639-1 code: sk; ISO 639-2(B) code: slo; ISO 639-2(T) code: slk; SIL code: slk)

South Slavic languages:

• Western Section
  • Serbian (ISO 639-1 code: sr; ISO 639-2/3 code: srp; SIL code: srp)
  • Slovenian - (ISO 639-1 code: sl; ISO 639-2 code: slv; SIL code: slv)
  • Croatian (ISO 639-1 code: hr; ISO 639-2/3 code: hrv; SIL code: hrv)
  • Bosnian (ISO 639-1 code: bs; ISO 639-2 code: bos; ISO/FDIS 639-3 code: bos)

• Eastern Section
  • Macedonian - (ISO 639-1 code: mk; ISO 639-2(B) code: mac; ISO 639-2(T) code: mkd; SIL code: mkd)
  • Bulgarian - (ISO 639-1 code: bg; ISO 639-2 code: bul; SIL code: bul)
  • Old Church Slavonic - extinct (ISO 639-1 code: cu; ISO 639-2 code: chu; SIL code: chu)

Para- and supranational languages

• Church Slavonic language, derived from Old Church Slavonic, but with significant replacement of the original vocabulary by forms from the Old Russian language and other regional forms. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Russian Orthodox Church, Polish Orthodox Church, Macedonian Orthodox Church and Serbian Orthodox Church continue to use Church Slavonic as a liturgical language. While not used in modern times, the text of a Church Slavonic mass survives in the Czech Republic, which is best known through Janáček's musical setting of it (the Glagolitic Mass).

A planned language called Slovio also exists: constructed on the basis of Slavic languages, and intended to facilitate intercommunication between people each of whom already speak at least one Slavic language.

See also

• Slavistics
• Language families and languages
• False Friends of the Slavist

References

• Lockwood, W.B. A Panorama of Indo-European Languages. Hutchinson University Library, 1972. ISBN 0-09-111020-3 hardback, ISBN 0-09-111021-1 paperback.
• Marko Jesensek, The Slovene Language in the Alpine and Pannonian Language Area, 2005. ISBN:83-242-0577-2

External links

• Ethnic continuity and Slavic ethnogenesis
• Let's try Slavic languages!
• Slavic dictionaries on Slavic Net
• Slavistik-Portal The Slavistics Portal (Germany)