West Slavic

 

also called Slavonic languages, a subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. Because the Slavic group of languages seems to be closer to the Baltic group than to any other, some scholars combine the two in a Balto-Slavic subfamily of the Indo-European classification. Today, for the most part, Slavic languages are spoken in E Europe and N Asia. The total number of people for whom a Slavic language is the mother tongue is estimated at more than 300 million; the great majority of them live in Russia and Ukraine.

The Slavic subfamily has three divisions: East Slavic, West Slavic, and South Slavic. Members of the East Slavic branch are Russian, or Great Russian; Ukrainian, also called Little Russian or Ruthenian; and Belarusian, or White Russian. Together they claim close to 225 million native speakers, almost all in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and neighboring countries. The West Slavic branch includes Polish, Czech, Slovak, Lusatian, Kashubian, and the extinct Polabian. The living West Slavic languages can claim approximately 56 million speakers, chiefly in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. The South Slavic tongues consist of Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, Slovenian, and Macedonian, together with the liturgical language known as Church Slavonic. The first four are native to more than 30 million people, largely in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Bulgaria.

All Slavic tongues are believed to have evolved from a single parent language, usually called Proto-Slavic, which, in turn, is thought to have split off much earlier (possibly c.2000 B.C.) from Proto-Indo-European, the original ancestor of the members of the Indo-European language family. Proto-Slavic was probably still common to all Slavs in the 1st cent. B.C., and possibly as late as the 8th or 9th cent. A.D., but by the 10th cent. A.D. the individual Slavic languages had begun to emerge.

General Characteristics

The spoken Slavic tongues resemble one another more closely than do those of the Germanic and Romance groups; yet, although Slavic languages have much in common in basic vocabulary, grammar, and phonetic characteristics, they differ with regard to such features in many instances. One feature common to most of them is the relatively large number of consonant sounds. A striking instance showing divided usage is the varied position of the primary accent in the individual Slavic languages. For example, in Czech the stress falls on the initial syllable of a word and in Polish on the next-to-last syllable, whereas in Russian and Bulgarian the accent can fall on any syllable.

Grammar

Grammatically the Slavic languages, with the exception of Bulgarian and Macedonian, have a highly developed inflection of the noun, with up to seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative, instrumental, and vocative). The Slavic verb usually takes one of three simple tenses (past, present, and future), but it is further characterized by a complex feature called aspect, which can be either imperfective (showing continuous or repeated action) or perfective (denoting a completed action). Participles and gerunds are often employed where in English clauses would be used. The article is lacking in all Slavic languages except Bulgarian and Macedonian. Members of the Slavic subfamily are more conservative and thus closer to Proto-Indo-European than languages in the Germanic and Romance groups, as is witnessed by their preservation of seven of the eight cases for the noun that Proto-Indo-European possessed and by their continuation of aspects for the verb.

Vocabulary

The vocabulary of the Slavic languages is substantially of Indo-European origin; there is an important Balto-Slavic element as well. Loan words or loan translations can be traced to the Iranian and Germanic groups and also to Greek, Latin, and Turkish. More recently, Italian and French have had some measure of influence. Slavic languages have also borrowed from each other. They tend, however, to translate and imitate foreign words rather than directly absorb them.

Writing

It is in writing, perhaps, that the most dramatic differences among the Slavic languages occur. Some Slavic languages (notably, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, and Polish) are written in differing versions of the Roman alphabet because their speakers are predominantly Roman Catholic. Other Slavic languages (such as Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian) use variations of the Cyrillic alphabet as a result of the influence of the Orthodox Eastern Church. Serbo-Croatian has several dialects, the most important of which are Serbian, which is written with the Cyrillic alphabet, and Croatian, which is written with the Roman alphabet.

The invention of the Cyrillic alphabet is ascribed traditionally to Cyril, a Greek missionary sent by Constantinople to the Slavic peoples in the 9th cent. A.D., although it may have been the work of his followers. The Cyrillic alphabet was augmented with signs based on the Greek alphabet, added to denote Slavic sounds not found in Greek. So far as is known, no writing in a Slavic language existed before the 9th cent. A.D.; the oldest Slavic texts to survive are in Old Church Slavonic and belong to the 10th and 11th cent.

See also the articles on many of the languages mentioned and Indo-European.

Bibliography

See R. Jakobson, Slavic Languages (2d ed. 1955); L. J. Herman, A Dictionary of Slavic Word Families (1974); H. Birnbaum, Common Slavic (1979); A. M. Schenker and E. Stankiewicz, ed., The Slavic Literary Languages (1980); S. C. Gardiner, Old Church Slavonic (1984); R. Jakobson, Russian and Slavic Grammar: Studies, 1931–1981 (ed. by L. R. Waugh and M. Halle, 1984).

Slavic
Geographic distribution:	throughout Eastern Europe
Genetic classification:	Indo-European  Slavic
Subdivisions:	East Slavic South Slavic West Slavic
ISO 639-2:	sla

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),
  • Lechitic languages: Polish , Pomeranian/Kashubian and extinct Polabian.
• South Slavic, which further subdivide into:
  • Western subgroup composed of Serbian, Slovenian, Croatian and Bosnian, (latin script; the Serbs use cyrillic and latin script)
  • Eastern subgroup composed of Bulgarian and Macedonian (cyrillic script).
    • 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. Although most believe that Old Novgorod dialect was west slavic. 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.

History

Indo-European topics
Indo-European languages
Albanian · Armenian  · Baltic Celtic · Germanic  · Greek Indo-Iranian (Iranian, Indo-Aryan) Italic · Slavic   extinct: Anatolian · Paleo-Balkans (Dacian · Thracian · Phrygian) Tocharian
Indo-European peoples
Albanians · Armenians Balts · Celts · Germanic peoples Greeks · Indo-Aryans · Iranians · Latins · Slavs historical: Anatolians (Hittites, Luwians)  · Germanic tribes · Celts (Gauls, Galatians) Italic peoples  · Indo-Iranians (Iranian tribes) Illyrians  · Thracians  · Tocharians
Proto-Indo-Europeans
Language · Society · Religion
Urheimat hypotheses
Kurgan hypothesis · Anatolia Armenia · India · PCT
Indo-European studies

Common roots and ancestry

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

Some like historical linguistics (Oswald Szemerényi, August Schleicher) postulates 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.

Other linguists 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

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. 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 Croatian in 1830, 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 most important early monument of Croatian literacy is the Baška tablet from the late 11th century. It is a large stone tablet found in the small church of St. Lucy on the Croatian island of Krk, containing text written mostly in čakavian, today a dialect of Croatian, and in Croatian Glagolitic script. The independence of Dubrovnik facilitated the continuity of the tradition. 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 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.

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).

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 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, therefore severing the connection between Slavs in White Croatia (Crobatia, present-day Poland) and White Serbia (Pomeria, present-day Germany) from southern Slavs - Croats and Serbians. Frankish conquests completed the geographical separation between these two groups, also 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 (vstrecha) "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,^[1] tolk (interpreter) from Old Slavic tlŭkŭ,^[2] and pråm (barge) from West Slavonic pramŭ.^[3]

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 (vodka). Lit. "little water", from common Slavic voda , (water, cognate to English word) with the diminutive ending -ka.^[4] Owing to medieval fur trade with Northern Russia, Pan-European loans from Russian include such familiar words as sable^[5] and hamster.^[6] The English word vampire was borrowed (perhaps via French vampire) from German Vampir, in turn borrowed from early Old Polish *vą-pěr-ь, continuing Proto-Slavic *ǫ-pěr-ь. Serbian вампир/vampir just like modern Polish wampir are borrowings from German.^[7]

Detailed list with ISO 639 and SIL codes

The following tree for the Slavic languages derives from the Ethnologue report for Slavic languages.^[8] 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, Serbian Orthodox Church, and even some Catolic Churches in Croatia 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 Croatia and Czech Republic, which is best known through Janáček's musical setting of it (the Glagolitic Mass).

See also

• Slavistics
• Language families and languages
• Freising manuscripts
• 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

Footnotes

External links

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

Slavic languages and dialects
East Slavic	Belarusian | Old East Slavic† | Old Novgorod dialect† | Russian | Carpathian Rusyn | Ruthenian† | Ukrainian
West Slavic	Czech | Kashubian | Knaanic† | Lower Sorbian | Pannonian Rusyn | Polabian† | Polish | Pomeranian† | Slovak | Slovincian† | Upper Sorbian
South Slavic	Banat Bulgarian | Bulgarian | Church Slavonic | Macedonian | Old Church Slavonic† | Serbo-Croatian (Bosnian, Bunjevac, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian, Šokac) | Slavic (Greece) | Slovenian
Other (†Extinct)	Proto-Slavic† | Russenorsk† | Slavoserbian†

Slavic-speaking states
West Slavic  Czech Republic  Poland  Slovakia South Slavic  Bosnia and Herzegovina  Bulgaria  Croatia  Republic of Macedonia  Montenegro  Serbia  Slovenia East Slavic  Belarus  Russia  Transnistria (unrecognized)  Ukraine

be-x-old:Славянскія мовыhsb:Słowjanske rěčepms:Lenghe slavermy:Slavikane chhibaru-sib:Словянски говорыcu:Cловѣньсци ѩзыци

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