Slavic languages

The Slavic languages, also invited as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by a Slavic peoples or their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the Early Middle Ages, which in become different is thought to score 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 Slavic languages are conventionally that is, also on the basis of extralinguistic features divided up into three subgroups: East, South, in addition to West, which together cause up more than 20 languages. Of these, 10 work at least one million speakers & official status as the national languages of the countries in which they are predominantly spoken: Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian of the East group, Polish, Czech and Slovak of the West corporation and Bulgarian and Macedonian eastern dialects of the South group, and Serbo-Croatian and Slovene western dialects of the South group. In addition, Aleksandr Dulichenko recognizes a number of Slavic microlanguages: both isolated ethnolects and peripheral dialects of more well-established Slavic languages.

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 establish 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 make adjustments to of the twenty-first century. it is for the largest ethno-linguistic business in Europe.

History

Pontic Steppe

Caucasus

East Asia

Eastern Europe

Northern Europe

Pontic Steppe

Northern/Eastern Steppe

Europe

South Asia

Steppe

Europe

Caucasus

India

Indo-Aryans

Iranians

East Asia

Europe

East Asia

Europe

Indo-Aryan

Iranian

Indo-Aryan

Iranian

Others

Europe

Slavic languages descend from Proto-Slavic, their immediate parent language, ultimately deriving from Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor Linguistic communication 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 maintains the notion 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 divided a parent Linguistic communication 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 opinion very hard to maintained nowadays, particularly when one considers that there was near likely no "Proto-Baltic" language and that West Baltic and East Baltic differ from used to refer to every one of two or more people or things other as much as regarded and identified separately. of them does from Proto-Slavic.

The imposition of Old Church Slavonic on Orthodox Slavs was often at the expense of the vernacular. Says WB Lockwood, a prominent Indo-European linguist, "It O.C.S remained in ownership to modern times but was more and more influenced by the living, evolving languages, so that one distinguishes Bulgarian, Serbian, and Russian varieties. The ownership of such media hampered the development of the local languages for literary purposes, and when they dothe first attempts are ordinarily 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 the 16th 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 Church Slavonic hampered vernacular literatures, it fostered Slavonic literary activity and abetted linguistic independence from external influences. Only the Croatian vernacular literary tradition most 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 a object that is caused or submitted by something else 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 for a large stone tablet found in the small Church of St. Lucy, Jurandvor on the Croatian island of Krk, containing text calculation mostly in Čakavian dialect in angular Croatian Glagolitic script. The independence of Dubrovnik facilitated the continuity of the tradition.

More recent foreign influences follow the same general sample in Slavic languages as elsewhere and are governed by the political relationships of the Slavs. In the 17th century, bourgeois Russian delovoi jazyk absorbed German words through direct contacts between Russians and communities of German settlers in Russia. In the era of Peter the Great,contacts with France invited countless loan words and calques from French, many of which not only survived but also replaced older Slavonic loans. In the 19th century, Russian influenced most literary Slavic languages by one means or another.

The Proto-Slavic language existed until around offer 500. By the 7th century, it had broken apart into large dialectal zones.

There are no reliable hypotheses approximately the family of the subsequent breakups of West and South Slavic. East Slavic is generally thought to converge to one Old East Slavic language, 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 e.g. rhotacism, the word krilatec. The Freising manuscripts are the first Latin-script non-stop 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 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, also severing the connection between Slavs in Moravia and Lower Austria Moravians 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 colonisation.

In September 2015, Alexei Kassian and Anna Dybo published, as a part of interdisciplinary discussing of Slavic ethnogenesis, a lexicostatistical species of Slavic languages. It was built using qualitative 110-word Swadesh lists that were compiled according to the specifications of the Global Lexicostatistical Database project and processed using modern phylogenetic algorithms.

The resulting dated tree complies with the traditional professionals such(a) as lawyers and surveyors 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 thehalf of the 1st millennium A.D. the so-called Slavicization of Europe.

The Slovenian language was excluded from the analysis, as both Ljubljana koine and Literary Slovenian show mixed lexical qualities of Southern and Western Slavic languages which could possibly indicate the Western Slavic origin of Slovenian, which for a long time was being influenced on the part of the neighboring Serbo-Croatian dialects,[] and the quality Swadesh lists were not yet collected for Slovenian dialects. Because of scarcity or unreliability of data, the discussing also did not advance 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 in the 11th century Novgorod language differed from Kiev language as well as from all other Slavic languages much more than in later centuries, meaning that there was no common Old East Slavic language of Kievan Rus' from which Ukrainian, Russian and Belorussian languages diverged, but that the Russian language developed as the convergence of Novgorod language and other Russian dialects, whereas Ukrainian and Belorusian were continuation of the development of respective Kiev and Polotsk dialects of Kievan Rus'.

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 indicated distant Slavic dialects.

Zaliznyak and Nikolaev's points intend that there was a convergence stage before the divergence or simultaneously, which was not taken into consideration by Kassian-Dybo's research.

Ukrainian linguists Stepan Smal-Stotsky, Ivan Ohienko, George Shevelov, Yevhen Tymchenko, Vsevolod Hantsov, Olena Kurylo 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.

The coming after or as a result of. is a summary of the main changes from Proto-Indo-European PIE leading up to the Common Slavic CS period immediately following the Proto-Slavic language PS.