Slavic Language Branch

Slavic languages are spoken by more than 300 million people mostly in Eastern Europe and Asia (Siberia). All Slavic languages are believed to have descended from a common ancestor called Proto-Slavic, which, in turn, is thought to have split off from Proto-Indo-European possibly as early as 2,000 B.C. Proto-Slavic, was probably the common language of all Slavs as late as the 8th or 9th century A.D., but by the 10th century A.D. the various Slavic varieties had begun to emerge as separate languages. Slavic languages are usually divided into three groups which, in turn, encompass smaller dialect groups. The table below shows the number of speakers of the major Slavic languages and where these languages are spoken, based on Ethnologue data.

Status

With the exception of Sorbian, all Slavic languages are national or official languages of the countries where they are predominantly spoken. In addition, many of them are working languages of countries where they don’t have official status. This is particularly true of Russian which is no longer an official language but remains an important working language of the former Soviet republics. In addition, some countries have regional languages. For instance, Serbia recognizes Hungarian, Albanian, and Slovak as regional languages, and Russia which has 105 languages spoken on its territory, recognizes the regional status of dozens of different languages. Upper Sorbian is recognized in Germany as a minority language.

Dialects

All Slavic languages comprise several dialects, depending on the analysis

There is some disagreement about the status of some Slavic languages as to whether they are dialects or separate languages.

• Rusyn, spoken by over 600,000 people, mostly in Ukraine, is considered by some to be a dialect of Ukrainian, but speakers consider it to be a separate language.
• Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian are essentially dialects of one language, but they are considered to be separate languages for political reasons.

Structure

Sound System

The sound systems of Slavic languages are characterized by both similarities and differences. Vowels Most Slavic languages have five vowel phonemes, i.e., sounds that differentiate word meaning. A typical Slavic vowel inventory is given below.

Consonants

The consonant systems of Slavic languages are characterized by the following:

• a relatively large number of consonants and consonant clusters.
• utilization of the opposition between unpalatalized and palatalized consonants. Palatalization refers to production of consonants with the blade of the tongue raised toward the roof of the mouth (hard palate). Slavic languages differ as to the number of consonants that can be palatalized.
• Some languages devoice final consonants (e.g., Russian), whereas others do not (e.g., Ukrainian).
• Only Polish has nasal vowels.
• Some Slavic languages, particularly Western and Southern ones, have syllabic [r] and [l].

Stress

Slavic languages have different stress patterns.

Grammar

All Slavic languages have highly developed inflectional systems.

Nouns

Slavic nouns are marked for gender, number, and case. The three are fused into one ending, Slavic nouns have the following grammatical categories:

• gender: masculine, feminine, neuter
• noun and adjective declensions are largely based on gender
• number: singular and plural, with vestiges of dual
• case: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, vocative. However, only a few nouns have retained the vocative forms. Bulgarian and Macedonian have lost cast distinctions, except for masculine animate nouns in the accusative case.
• Animate and inanimate masculine nouns have different endings in the accusative case.
• There are no indefinite or definite articles, except for Bulgarian and Macedonian that have a post-posited definite article attached to the nouns/adjectives.
• Adjectives are marked for gender and case only in the singular. In the plural they are marked only for case, except for Bulgarian and Macedonian (see above).
• Adjectives and possessive and demonstrative pronouns precede the nouns they modify and agree with them in gender, number, and case, except for Bulgarian and Macedonian.

Verbs

Slavic verbs agree with their subjects in person and number in the non-past, and in gender and number in the past. They are marked for the following categories:

• three persons: first, second, third
• All Slavic languages are pro-drop language, i.e., personal pronouns can be dropped because the verb ending makes the person clear.
• Two to three conjugations based on last vowel of the stem.
• Two tenses: past, non-past. Present and future tenses have the same endings. Some languages use auxiliary verbs (e.g., Bulgarian), whereas other do not (e.g., Russian).
• Two aspects: imperfective and perfective. Perfective and imperfective verbs are formed from basic verb roots by adding prefixes and suffixes. Non-past conjugation of perfective verbs indicates future tense, non-past conjugation of imperfective verbs indicates present tense. Imperfective verbs form future tense with the auxiliary verb ‘be’.
• three moods: indicative, imperative, conditional
• two voices: active, passive
• Verbs of motion constitute a special subcategory characterized by a complex system of directional and aspectual prefixes and suffixes.

Word order

The neutral word order in Slavic languages is Subject-Verb-Object. However, other orders are also possible since inflectional endings make clear grammatical relations and roles of words in the sentence. Word order is primarily determined by topic (what the sentence is about, or old information) and comment (new information). Constituents with old information (topic) precede constituents with new information (comment). For instance, in Russian, Subject-Verb order Misha chitaet means ‘Misha is reading,’ while Verb-Subject order in Chitaet Misha means ‘It is Misha who is reading.’

Vocabulary

Slavic languages inherited most of their vocabulary from Proto-Slavic. They have borrowed a large number of words from Old Church Slavonic, Greek,Latin, French, German, English, and neighboring languages. The sources of borrowing vary somewhat from language to language, depending on history and geographical location, e.g., Balkan languages such as Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Macedonian have a large number of Turkish words because their territories had been occupied by the Ottoman Empire. Below are some common words in Slavic languages, representing the three branches.

Below are numerals 1-10 in these languages.

Writing

Some Slavic languages are written with adapted versions of the Latin alphabet, while others are written with different versions of the Cyrillic alphabet. Some languages are written with both alphabets.

Cyrillic alphabet

In 861 AD, Prince Rostislav of the Slavic-speaking Moravians (located in present-day Czech Republic) sent a message to the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople: “We don’t understand Latin or Greek. Please send us someone to teach us in our language.” The reason Rostislav appealed to the Byzantine Church is because it taught each nation in its own language, while the Church of Rome at the time used only Latin. The Emperor sent two Greek brothers, Cyril and Methodius, who knew both Slavic and Greek. The two brothers created the Glagolytic alphabet to translate the Bible and the liturgy. Glagolitic soon fell into disuse and vanished. The other one came to be known as Cyrillic. It is based on the Greek alphabet with some letters borrowed from Coptic and Hebrew in cases when the Greek alphabet did not have letters to represent Slavic sounds. Today, the Cyrillic alphabet is used by over 200 million people, representing more than 100 languages. Old Church Slavonic Old Church Slavonic (also called Old Slavic, Old Church Slavic or Old Bulgarian) is the first literary and liturgical Slavic language developed by the 9th century missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius. It was based on Moravian, a southern variety of Bulgarian as it was spoken at the time. Cyril and Methodius used Old Church Slavonic for translating the Bible and other religious texts from Greek. Today, Old Church Slavonic remains the liturgical language of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Difficulty

Language Difficulty

How difficult is it to learn Slavic Languages? All Slavic languages belong to Category II in terms of difficulty for speakers of English.