Everything about The Slavic Language totally explained
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:
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, due to traits the West and East Slavic branches share with each other that they don't with the South Slavic languages.
The tripartite division of the Slavic languages doesn't 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 don't stand out when comparing Slavic literary (for example, 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 Slovene.
History
Common roots and ancestry
All Slavic languages are descendants of
Proto-Slavic, their
parent language.
Mainstream
historical linguists (
Oswald Szemerényi,
August Schleicher) postulate 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 couldn't have shared a parent language after the breakup of the
Proto-Indo-European continuum about five millennia ago.
Evolution
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 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 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 14th 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 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 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, close contacts with
France invited countless
loan words and
calques from
French, a significant fraction of which not only survived, but replaced older Slavonic loans. In the 19th century, Russian influenced most literary Slavic languages by one means or another. 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. Russian words were imported en masse to
Bulgarian, to replace
Turkish and
Greek loans, so that many Bulgarian words now carry a Russian phonetic footnote (for example, have a phonetic structure unusual for Bulgarian language or, indeed, for South Slavic languages in general).
Differentiation
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 12th 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
Romance-speaking
Vlachs from the remnants of the old
Roman Empire.
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
Slovene dialects (for example
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, thus 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 the ancestors of
Slovenes 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".
Influence on neighbouring languages
Most languages of the former Soviet Union, Russia and neighboring 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 neighboring 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. For instance, Max Vasmer has observed that there are no Slavic loans into Common Germanic. The only Germanic language that shows significant Slavic influence is Yiddish. There are isolated Slavic loans into other Germanic languages. For example the word for "border", in modern German Grenze, Dutch grens was loaned 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, tolk (interpreter) from Old Slavic tlŭkŭ, and pråm (barge) from West Slavonic pramŭ.
The Czech word is now found in most languages worldwide, and the word, also from Czech, and is found in many Indo-European languages.
A well known Slavic word in almost all European languages is vodka, a borrowing from Russian водка (vodka). Lit. "little water", from common Slavic voda, (water, cognate to English word) with the diminutive ending -ka. Owing to medieval fur trade with Northern Russia, Pan-European loans from Russian include such familiar words as sable and hamster. The English word vampire was borrowed (perhaps via French vampire) from German Vampir, in turn derived from Serbian vampir, continuing Proto-Slavic *ǫ-pěr-ь. (although Polish scholar K. Stachowski has argued that the origin of the word is early Old Polish *vą-pěr-ь).
Detailed list with ISO 639 and SIL codes
The following tree for the Slavic languages derives from the Ethnologue report for Slavic languages. 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:
Ruthenian section
- 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)
- Rusyn - (ISO 639-2 code: sla; SIL code: rue)
Russian - (ISO 639-1 code: ru; ISO 639-2 code: rus; SIL code: rus)
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
- Silesian - (ISO 639-3 code: szl)
- 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)
- Slovene - (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 639-2/3 code: bos; SIL code: bos)
- Montenegrin (not regulated but official in Montenegro)
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 Roman Catholic Churches in Croatia continue to use Church Slavonic as a liturgical language. While not used in modern times, the text of a Church Slavonic Roman Rite Mass survives in the Croatia and Czech Republic, which is best known through Janáček's musical setting of it (the Glagolitic Mass).Further Information
Get more info on 'Slavic Language'.
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