Slavic languages


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 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 and is highly diverse.
The Slavic languages are conventionally 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, Polish, Czech and Slovak, Bulgarian and Macedonian, and Serbo-Croatian and Slovene. In addition, Aleksandr Dulichenko recognizes a number of Slavic microlanguages: both isolated ethnolects and peripheral dialects of more well-established Slavic languages.
All Slavic languages have fusional morphology and, with a partial exception of Bulgarian and Macedonian, they have fully developed inflection-based conjugation and declension. In their relational synthesis Slavic languages distinguish between lexical and inflectional suffixes. In all cases, the lexical suffix precedes the inflectional in an agglutination mode. The fusional categorization of Slavic languages is based on grammatic inflectional suffixes alone.
Prefixes are also used, particularly for lexical modification of verbs. For example, the equivalent of English "came out" in Russian is "vyshel", where the prefix "vy-" means "out", the reduced root "-sh" means "come", and the suffix "-el" denotes past tense of masculine gender. The equivalent phrase for a feminine subject is "vyshla". The gender conjugation of verbs, as in the preceding example, is another feature of some Slavic languages rarely found in other language groups.
The well-developed fusional grammar allows Slavic languages to have a somewhat unusual feature of virtually free word order in a sentence clause, although subject–verb–object and adjective-before-noun is the preferred order in the neutral style of speech.

Branches

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. 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.
Slavic languages diverged from a common proto-language later than any other groups of the Indo-European language family, and enough differences exist between the any two geographically distant Slavic languages to make spoken communication between such speakers cumbersome. As usually found within other language groups, mutual intelligibility between Slavic languages is better for geographically adjacent languages and in the written form. Recent studies of mutual intelligibility between Slavic languages have said, that their traditional three-branch division does not withstand quantitative scrutiny. While the grouping of Czech, Slovak and Polish into West Slavic turned out to be appropriate, Western South Slavic Serbo-Croatian and Slovene were found to be closer to Czech and Slovak than to Eastern South Slavic Bulgarian.
The traditional tripartite division of the Slavic languages does not take into account the spoken dialects of each language. 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. In certain cases transitional dialects and hybrid dialects often bridge the gaps between different languages, showing similarities that do not stand out when comparing Slavic literary languages. For example, Slovak and Ukrainian are bridged by the Rusyn language spoken in Transcarpatian Ukraine and adjacent counties of Slovakia and Ukraine. Similarly, the Croatian Kajkavian dialect is more similar to Slovene than to the standard Croatian language.
Modern Russian differs from other Slavic languages in an unusually high percentage of words of non-Slavic origin, particularly of Dutch, French and German.
Another difference between the East, South, and West Slavic branches is in the orthography of the standard languages: West Slavic languages 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 Eastern-Catholic faith, have had more Greek influence. Two Slavic languages, Belarusian and Serbo-Croatian, are biscriptal, i.e. written in either alphabet either presently or in a recent past.

History

Common roots and ancestry

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, 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.
File:Bascanska ploca.jpg|thumb|right|Baška tablet, 11th century, Krk, Croatia

Differentiation

The Proto-Slavic language originated in the area of modern Ukraine and Belarus mostly overlapping with the northern part of Indoeuropean Urheimat, which is within the boundaries of modern Ukraine and Southern Federal District of Russia.
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 of Kievan Rus, 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. 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 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 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 colonization.
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 Slovenian language was excluded from the analysis, as both Ljubljana koine and Literary Slovenian show mixed lexical features of Southern and Western Slavic languages, 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 and the center 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 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.

Linguistic history

The following is a summary of the main changes from Proto-Indo-European leading up to the Common Slavic period immediately following the Proto-Slavic language.
  1. Satemisation:
  2. * PIE *ḱ, *ǵ, *ǵʰ → *ś, *ź, *źʰ
  3. * PIE *kʷ, *gʷ, *gʷʰ → *k, *g, *gʰ
  4. Ruki rule: Following *r, *u, *k or *i, PIE *s → *š
  5. Loss of voiced aspirates: PIE *bʰ, *dʰ, *gʰ → *b, *d, *g
  6. Merger of *o and *a: PIE *a/*o, *ā/*ō → PS *a, *ā
  7. Law of open syllables: All closed syllables are eventually eliminated, in the following stages:
  8. # Nasalization: With *N indicating either *n or *m not immediately followed by a vowel: PIE *aN, *eN, *iN, *oN, *uN → *ą, *ę, *į, *ǫ, *ų.
  9. # In a cluster of obstruent + another consonant, the obstruent is deleted unless the cluster can occur word-initially.
  10. # Monophthongization of diphthongs.
  11. # Elimination of liquid diphthongs.
  12. First palatalization: *k, *g, *x → CS *č, *ž, *š before a front vocalic sound.
  13. Iotation: Consonants are palatalized by an immediately following *j:
  14. ** sj, *zj → CS *š, *ž
  15. ** nj, *lj, *rj → CS *ň, *ľ, *ř
  16. ** tj, *dj → CS *ť, *ď
  17. ** bj, *pj, *mj, *wj → *bľ, *pľ, *mľ, *wľ
  18. Vowel fronting: After *j or some other palatal sound, back vowels are fronted. This leads to hard/soft alternations in noun and adjective declensions.
  19. Prothesis: Before a word-initial vowel, *j or *w is usually inserted.
  20. Monophthongization: *ai, *au, *ei, *eu, *ū → *ē, *ū, *ī, *jū, *ȳ
  21. Second palatalization: *k, *g, *x → CS *c, *dz, *ś before new *ē. *ś later splits into *š, *s.
  22. Progressive palatalization : *k, *g, *x → CS *c, *dz, *ś after *i, *ī in certain circumstances.
  23. Vowel quality shifts: All pairs of long/short vowels become differentiated as well by vowel quality:
  24. ** a, *ā → CS *o, *a
  25. ** e, *ē → CS *e, *ě
  26. ** i, *u → CS *ь, *ъ
  27. ** ī, *ū, *ȳ → CS *i, *u, *y
  28. Elimination of liquid diphthongs: Liquid diphthongs are changed so that the syllable becomes open:
  29. ** or, *ol, *er, *el → *ro, *lo, *re, *le in West Slavic.
  30. ** or, *ol, *er, *el → *oro, *olo, *ere, *olo in East Slavic.
  31. ** or, *ol, *er, *el → *rā, *lā, *re, *le in South Slavic.
  32. * Possibly, *ur, *ul, *ir, *il → syllabic *r, *l, *ř, *ľ.
  33. Development of phonemic tone and vowel length : Complex developments.

Features

The Slavic languages are a relatively homogeneous family, compared with other families of Indo-European languages. 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. 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.

Consonants

The following table shows the inventory of consonants of Late Common Slavic:
1The sound did not occur in West Slavic, where it had developed to.
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, or of various consonants followed by *j.
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 sounds, which formed pairs with the corresponding non-palatalized consonants and absorbed the existing palatalized sounds. These sounds were best preserved in Russian but were lost to varying degrees in other languages. The following table shows the inventory of modern Russian:
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,

Vowels

A typical vowel inventory is as follows:
FrontCentralBack
Close
Mid
Open

The sound occurs only in some languages, 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.
  • Russian мышь and Polish mysz "mouse"
Common Slavic also had two nasal vowels: *ę and *ǫ. However, these are preserved only in modern Polish.
  • Polish wąż and węże "snake, snakes"
Other phonemic vowels are found in certain languages.

Length, accent, and tone

An area of great difference among Slavic languages is that of prosody. 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:
  • All vowels could occur either short or long, and this was phonemic.
  • There was a single accented syllable per word, distinguished by higher pitch rather than greater dynamic stress.
  • Vowels in accented syllables could be pronounced with either a rising or falling tone, and this was phonemic.
  • The accent was free in that it could occur on any syllable and was phonemic.
  • The accent was mobile in that its position could potentially vary among closely related words within a single paradigm.
  • Even within a given inflectional class, there were multiple accent patterns in which a given word could be inflected. For example, most nouns in a particular inflectional class could follow one of three possible patterns: Either there was a consistent accent on the root, predominant accent on the ending, or accent that moved between the root and ending. In patterns B and C, the accent in different parts of the paradigm shifted not only in location but also type. Each inflectional class had its own version of patterns B and C, which might differ significantly from one inflectional class to another.
The modern languages vary greatly in the extent to which they preserve this system. On one extreme, Serbo-Croatian preserves the system nearly unchanged ; on the other, Macedonian has basically lost the system in its entirety. Between them are found numerous variations:
  • Slovenian preserves most of the system but has shortened all unaccented syllables and lengthened non-final accented syllables so that vowel length and accent position largely co-occur.
  • Russian and Bulgarian have eliminated distinctive vowel length and tone and converted the accent into a stress accent but preserved its position. As a result, the complexity of the mobile accent and the multiple accent patterns still exists.
  • Czech and Slovak have preserved phonemic vowel length and converted the distinctive tone of accented syllables into length distinctions. The phonemic accent is otherwise lost, but the former accent patterns are echoed to some extent in corresponding patterns of vowel length/shortness in the root. Paradigms with mobile vowel length/shortness do exist but only in a limited fashion, usually only with the zero-ending forms having a different length from the other forms.
  • Old Polish had a system very much like Czech. Modern Polish has lost vowel length, but some former short-long pairs have become distinguished by quality, with the result that some words have vowel-quality changes that exactly mirror the mobile-length patterns in Czech and Slovak.

Grammar

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.

Selected cognates

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-SlavicRussianUkrainianBelarusianRusynPolishCzechSlovakSloveneSerbo-CroatianBulgarianMacedonian
*uxo ухо вухо вуха ухо uchouchouchouhoухо /
уво / 		ухо уво
*ognь огонь вогонь агонь огинь ogieńoheňoheňogenjогањ / огън оган/огин
*ryba рыба риба рыба рыба rybarybarybaribaриба / риба риба
*gnězdo гнездо гнiздо гняздо гнïздо gniazdohnízdohniezdognezdoгнездо /
гнијездо /
гниздо / 		гнездо гнездо
*oko око
modern: глаз 		око вока око okookookookoоко / око око
*golva голова
глава "chapter or chief, leader, head"		голова галава голова głowahlavahlavaglavaглава / глава глава
*rǫka рука рука рука рука rękarukarukarokaрука / ръка рака
*noktь ночь ніч ноч нуч nocnocnocnočноћ / нощ ноќ

Influence on neighboring languages

Most languages of the former Soviet Union and of some neighbouring countries 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.

Germanic languages

, a specialist in Slavic etymology, has claimed that there were no Slavic loans into Proto-Germanic. However, there are isolated Slavic loans into other Germanic languages. For example, the word for "border" was borrowed from the Common Slavic 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 from the German Quark, which in turn is derived from the Slavic tvarog, which means "curd". Many German surnames, particularly in Eastern Germany and Austria, are Slavic in origin. The Nordic languages also have torg/torv from Old Russian tъrgъ or Polish targ, humle,
räka/reke/''reje,
and, via Middle Low German tolk from Old Slavic tlŭkŭ, and pråm/pram'' from West Slavonic pramŭ.

Finno-Ugric languages

languages have many words in common with Slavic languages. According to Petri Kallio, this suggests Slavic words being borrowed into Finnic 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.
Russian dialects have numerous borrowings from Finno-Ugric languages, particularly for forest terms and geographical names. This is related to the expansion in 7th to the 11th centuries AD of Slavic people into the areas of Central Russia previously populated by Finno-Ugric peoples, and the resulting genetic, cultural and linguistic exchange.

Other

The Czech word wikt: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 водка, from common Slavic voda with the diminutive ending -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 from German Vampir, in turn derived from Serbo-Croatian вампир, continuing Proto-Slavic *ǫpyrь, although Polish scholar K. Stachowski has argued that the origin of the word is early Slavic *vąpěrь, going back to Turkic oobyr.
Several European languages, including English, have borrowed the word polje directly from the former Yugoslav languages. During the heyday of the USSR in the 20th century, many more Russian words became known worldwide:, Soviet,,,,, etc. Another borrowed Russian term is .

Detailed list

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.
East Slavic languages:
South Slavic languages:
West Slavic languages:
Para- and supranational languages

General references

  • Lockwood, W.B. A Panorama of Indo-European Languages. Hutchinson University Library, 1972. hardback, paperback.
  • Marko Jesensek, The Slovene Language in the Alpine and Pannonian Language Area, 2005.
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