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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.

Contents

Branches

History

Common roots and ancestry

Evolution of Slavic languages

Differentiation of Slavic languages

Common features

Slavic influence on neighbouring languages

Detailed list with ISO 639 and SIL codes

See also

References

Footnotes

External links

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:

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★ Czech and Slovak,

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★ Upper and Lower Sorbian (minority languages in Germany),

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★ 'Lechitic languages: Polish , Pomeranian/Kashubian and extinct Polabian.

★ 'South Slavic', which further subdivide into:

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★ Western subgroup composed of Slovenian, Croatian and the Bosnian (latin script)

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★ Eastern subgroup composed of Serbian, Standard Bulgarian and Macedonian (cyrillic script).

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★ 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.

History

Common roots and ancestry

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

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]
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 ) 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 in early 18th century Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm. 16 Bde. [in 32 Teilbänden]. Leipzig: S. Hirzel 1854-1960. from Serbian ''вампир''/''vampir''. Merriam Webster Online Dictionary Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé ^[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')

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★ Upper Sorbian - (ISO 639-2 code: 'hsb'; SIL code: 'hsb')

★ Lechitic section

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★ Polish - (ISO 639-1 code, 'pl'; ISO 639-2 code, 'pol'; SIL code: 'pol')

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★ Pomeranian

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★ Kashubian - (ISO 639-2 code: 'csb'; SIL code: 'csb')

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★
★ Slovincian - extinct

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★ Polabian - extinct - (ISO 639-2 code: 'sla'; SIL code: 'pox')

★ Czech-Slovak section

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★ Czech - (ISO 639-1 code: 'cs'; ISO 639-2(B) code, 'cze'; ISO 639-2(T) code: 'ces'; SIL code: 'ces')

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★ Knaanic or Judeo Slavic - extinct - (ISO 639-2 code: 'sla'; SIL code: 'czk')

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★ 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')

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★ Slovenian - (ISO 639-1 code: 'sl'; ISO 639-2 code: 'slv'; SIL code: 'slv')

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★ Croatian (ISO 639-1 code: 'hr'; ISO 639-2/3 code: 'hrv'; SIL code: 'hrv')

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★ Bosnian (ISO 639-1 code: 'bs'; ISO 639-2 code: 'bos'; ISO/FDIS 639-3 code: 'bos')

★ Eastern Section

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★ Macedonian - (ISO 639-1 code: 'mk'; ISO 639-2(B) code: 'mac'; ISO 639-2(T) code: 'mkd'; SIL code: 'mkd')

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★ Bulgarian - (ISO 639-1 code: 'bg'; ISO 639-2 code: 'bul'; SIL code: 'bul')

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★ 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

★

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

1. torg
2. tolk
3. pråm
4. vodka
5. Sable
6. hamster
7. Dauzat, Albert, 1938. Dictionnaire étymologique. Librairie Larousse.
8. Indo-European, Slavic

External links

★ Ethnic continuity and Slavic ethnogenesis

★ Let's try Slavic languages!

★ Slavic dictionaries on Slavic Net

★ Slavistik-Portal The Slavistics Portal (Germany)