Interslavic


Interslavic is a pan-Slavic auxiliary language. Its purpose is to facilitate communication between speakers of various Slavic languages, as well as to allow people who do not speak a Slavic language to communicate with Slavic speakers by being mutually intelligible with most, if not all, Slavic languages. For Slavs and non-Slavs, it can be used for educational purposes as well. Its use spans a broad range of fields, including tourism and education.
Interslavic can be classified as a semi-constructed language. It is essentially a modern continuation of Old Church Slavonic, and also draws on the various improvised language forms that Slavs have used for centuries to communicate between nationalities, for example in multi-Slavic environments and on the Internet, providing them with a scientific base. Thus, both grammar and vocabulary are based on common elements between the Slavic languages. Its main focus lies on instant intelligibility rather than easy learning, a balance typical for naturalistic languages.
The Interslavic project began in 2006 under the name Slovianski. In 2011, Slovianski underwent a thorough reform and merged with two other projects, with the result called "Interslavic", a name that was first proposed by the Czech Ignác Hošek in 1908.
As with the languages of the Slavic language family, Interslavic is generally written using either Latin or Cyrillic letters, or on rare occasions the Glagolitic script.

History

Precursors of Interslavic have a long history and predate constructed languages like Volapük and Esperanto by centuries: the oldest description, written by the Croatian priest Juraj Križanić, goes back to the years 1659–1666.
The history of Pan-Slavic language projects is closely connected with Pan-Slavism, an ideology that endeavors cultural and political unification of all Slavs, based on the conception that all Slavic people are part of a single Slavic nation. Along with this belief came also the need for a Slavic umbrella language. Old Church Slavonic had partly served this role in previous centuries, as an administrative language in a large part of the Slavic world, and it was still used on a large scale in Orthodox liturgy, where it played a role similar to Latin in the West. A strong candidate for a more modern language is Russian, the language of the largest Slavic-speaking majority country and also mother tongue of more than half of Slavic speakers. However, the role of the Russian language as a lingua franca in Eastern Europe and the Balkans diminished after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In March 2006, the Slovianski project was started by a group of people from different countries, who felt the need for a simple and neutral Slavic language that the Slavs could understand without prior learning. The language they envisioned should be naturalistic and only consist of material existing in all or most Slavic languages, without any artificial additions. Initially, Slovianski was being developed in two different variants: a naturalistic version known as Slovianski-N, and a more simplified version known as Slovianski-P. The difference was that Slovianski-N had six grammatical cases, while Slovianski-P—like English, Bulgarian and Macedonian—used prepositions instead. Apart from these two variants, a schematic version, Slovianski-S, has been experimented with as well, but was abandoned in an early stage of the project. In 2009 it was decided that only the naturalistic version would be continued under the name Slovianski. Although Slovianski had three genders, six cases and full conjugation of verbs—features usually avoided in international auxiliary languages—a high level of simplification was achieved by means of simple, unambiguous endings and irregularity being kept to a minimum.
Slovianski was mostly used in Internet traffic and in a newsletter, Slovianska Gazeta. In February and March 2010 there was much publicity about Slovianski after articles had been dedicated to it on the Polish internet portal Interia.pl and the Serbian newspaper Večernje novosti. Shortly thereafter, articles about Slovianski appeared in the Slovak newspaper Pravda, on the news site of the Czech broadcasting station ČT24, in the Serbian blogosphere and the Serbian edition of Reader's Digest, as well as other newspapers and internet portals in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Ukraine.
Slovianski has played a role in the development of other, related projects as well. Rozumio and Slovioski were both efforts to build a bridge between Slovianski and Slovio. Originally, Slovioski, developed by Polish-American Steeven Radzikowski, was merely intended to reform Slovio, but gradually it developed into a separate language. Like Slovianski, it was a collaborative project that existed in two variants: a "full" and a simplified version. In 2009 a new language was published, Neoslavonic by the Czech Vojtěch Merunka, based on Old Church Slavonic grammar but using part of Slovianski's vocabulary.
In 2011, Slovianski, Slovioski and Novoslověnsky merged into one common project under the name Interslavic. Slovianski grammar and dictionary were expanded to include all options of Neoslavonic as well, turning it into a more flexible language based on prototypes rather than fixed rules. From that time, Slovianski and Neoslavonic have no longer been developed as separate projects, even though their names are still frequently in use as synonyms or "dialects" of Interslavic.
In the same year, the various simplified forms of Slovianski and Slovioski that were meant to meet the needs of beginners and non-Slavs were reworked into a highly simplified form of Interslavic, Slovianto. Slovianto is intended to have stages of complexity: level 1 with plurals, tenses, and basic vocabulary; level 2 with grammatical gender and basic verb conjugation; and a to-be-done level 3 with noun declension.
After the 2017 Conference on Interslavic Language, the project of unifying the two standards of Interslavic had been commenced by Merunka and van Steenbergen, with a planned new, singular grammar and orthography. An early example of this endeavor is Merunka and van Steenbergen's joint publication on Slavic cultural diplomacy, released to coincide with the conference.
After two failed applications for an ISO 639-3 code for Interslavic from 2012 and 2014, a third request was filed in September 2019 and resulted in the adoption of the ISO 639-3 code '' in April 2024.

Community

The number of people who speak Interslavic is difficult to establish; the lack of demographic data is a common problem among constructed languages, so that estimates are always rough. In 2012, the Bulgarian author G. Iliev mentioned a number of "several hundreds" of Slovianski speakers. For comparison, 320,000 people claimed to speak Esperanto in the same year. In 2022, the Russian magazine Mel mentioned a number of 20,000 speakers. This number clearly refers to the size of the Interslavic community as a whole and not necessarily to the number of active participants. As for the latter, Kocór e.a. estimated the number of active users of Interslavic to be 2,000.
Interslavic has an active online community, including four Facebook groups with 16,280, 835, 330 and 120 members respectively by 4 April 2022 and an Internet forum with around 490 members.
The project has two online news portals, a peer-reviewed expert journal focusing on issues of Slavic peoples in the wider sociocultural context of current times and a wiki united with a collection of texts and materials in Interslavic language somewhat similar to Wikisource. Since 2016, Interslavic is used in the scientific journal Ethnoentomology for paper titles, abstracts and image captions.
In June 2017, the first CISLa took place in the Czech town of Staré Město near Uherské Hradiště. The presentations were either held in Interslavic or translated into Interslavic. Two Interslavic conferences have been held since: CISLa 2018, again in Staré Město as well as in Hodonín, and CISLa 2020, held in Uherský Brod. An Insterslavic Day was held in Prague on September 21, 2022.
Various experiments with Interslavic practical use are being made: namely, short songs and film translations. In 2022, an Interslavic version of the song Jožin z bažin appeared. In the same year, a social app in early development was translated into Interslavic. The translation served as a "prosthesis" for the lack of translations into Slavic languages.
A volunteer group consisting of native speakers of all standard Slavic languages was established by one of the members of the Interslavic Language Committee. Small Slavic languages and dialects like Rusyn or Upper Sorbian are also included. The group task is to improve the quality of the Interslavic language dictionary by intelligibility analysis.

Phonology

The phonemes that were chosen for Interslavic were the most popular Slavic phonemes cross-linguistically. Since stress patterns vary greatly between Slavic languages and Interslavic is not an ethnic language, there are no hard and fast rules regarding stress.
Consonants and vowels in brackets are "optional" and link directly to Old Church Slavonic.
FrontCentralBack
Close
Near-close
Mid
Open-mid, jɛ
Near-open
Open

Alphabet

One of the main principles of Interslavic is that it can be written on any Slavic keyboard. Since the border between Latin and Cyrillic runs through the middle of Slavic territory, Interslavic allows the use of both alphabets. Because of the differences between, for instance, the Polish alphabet and other Slavic Latin alphabets, as well as between Serbian and other Cyrillic alphabets, orthographic variation is tolerated.
The Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are as follows:
LatinCyrillicKeyboard substitutionsPronunciation
A aA а
B bБ б
C cЦ ц
Č čЧ чLat. cx, cz~tʂ
D dД д
DŽ džДЖ джLat. dż, dzs, dzx~dʐ
E eЕ еɛ
Ě ěЄ єLat. e, Cyr. е jɛ
F fФ ф
G gГ г~
H hХ х
I iИ и
J jЈ јCyr. й
K kК к~
L lЛ л~l
Lj ljЉ љCyr. льl~
M mМ м
N nН н
Nj njЊ њCyr. нь~ɲ
O oО оɔ
P pП п
R rР р
S sС с
Š šШ шLat. sz, sx~ʂ
T tТ т
U uУ у
V vВ в
Y yЫ ыLat. i, Cyr. иi~~
Z zЗ з
Ž žЖ жLat. ż, zs, zx~ʐ