The current geographical distribution of natively spoken Slavic languages includes theBalkans,Central and Eastern Europe, and all the way fromWestern Siberia to theRussian 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.[1] It is the largest and most diverse ethno-linguistic group in Europe.[2][3]
The Slavic languages are conventionally (that is, also on the basis of extralinguistic features, such as geography) divided into three subgroups:East,South, andWest, which together constitute more than 20 languages. Of these, 10 have at least one million speakers and official status as thenational languages of the countries in which they are predominantly spoken:Russian,Belarusian andUkrainian (of the East group),Polish,Czech andSlovak (of the West group),Bulgarian andMacedonian (eastern members of the South group), andSerbo-Croatian andSlovene (western members of the South group). In addition,Aleksandr Dulichenko recognizes a number ofSlavic microlanguages: both isolated ethnolects and peripheral dialects of more well-established Slavic languages.[4][5][page needed][6]
Prefixes are also used, particularly for lexical modification of verbs. For example, the equivalent of English "came out" in Russian is "vyshel", where theprefix "vy-" means "out", the reducedroot "-sh" means "come", and thesuffix "-el" denotespast tense ofmasculine gender. The equivalent phrase for afemininesubject is "vyshla". The genderconjugation ofverbs, as in the preceding example, is another feature of some Slavic languages rarely found in other language groups.
Balto-Slavic language tree[citation needed]Linguistic maps of Slavic languages
Since the interwar period,[specify] 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 (from the vantage of linguistic features alone, there are only two branches of the Slavic languages, namely North and South).[8] These three conventional branches feature some of the following sub-branches:
Some linguists speculate that aNorth Slavic branch has existed as well. TheOld Novgorod dialect may have reflected some idiosyncrasies of this group.[11]
Slavic languages diverged from a commonproto-language later than any other groups of theIndo-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 otherlanguage groups, mutual intelligibility between Slavic languages is better for geographically adjacent languages and in the written (rather than oral) form.[12][13][14][15][16][17][18] Recent studies ofmutual intelligibility between Slavic languages have said, that their traditional three-branch division does not withstand quantitative scrutiny.[19][neutrality isdisputed] While the grouping ofCzech,Slovak andPolish intoWest Slavic turned out to be appropriate, Western South SlavicSerbo-Croatian andSlovene were found to be closer toCzech andSlovak (West Slavic languages) than to Eastern South SlavicBulgarian.
The traditional tripartite division of the Slavic languages does not take into account the spokendialects 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 (i.e. standard) languages. For example, Slovak (West Slavic) and Ukrainian (East Slavic) are bridged by theRusyn language spoken inTranscarpatian Ukraine and adjacent counties of Slovakia and Ukraine.[20] Similarly, the CroatianKajkavian dialect is more similar toSlovene than to the standard Croatian language.[citation needed]
ModernRussian differs from other Slavic languages in an unusually high percentage[citation needed][21] of words of non-Slavic origin, particularly ofDutch (e.g. fornaval terms introduced during the reign ofPeter I),French (for household and culinary terms during the reign ofCatherine II) andGerman (for medical, scientific and military terminology in the mid-1800s).
Another difference between the East, South, and West Slavic branches is in the orthography of the standard languages: West Slavic languages (and Western South Slavic languages –Croatian andSlovene) are written in theLatin script, and have had moreWestern European influence due to their proximity and speakers being historicallyRoman Catholic, whereas the East Slavic and Eastern South Slavic languages are written inCyrillic and, withEastern Orthodox orEastern-Catholic faith, have had moreGreek influence.[22] Two Slavic languages,Belarusian andSerbo-Croatian, are biscriptal, i.e. written in either alphabet either presently or in a recent past.
Area of Balto-Slavic dialectic continuum (purple) with proposed material cultures correlating to speakers Balto-Slavic in Bronze Age (white).Red dots = archaic Slavic hydronyms.
Slavic languages descend fromProto-Slavic, their immediateparent language, ultimately deriving fromProto-Indo-European, the ancestor language of allIndo-European languages, via aProto-Balto-Slavic stage. During the Proto-Balto-Slavic period a number of exclusiveisoglosses in phonology, morphology, lexis, and syntax developed, which makes Slavic andBaltic 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.[23]
A minority of Baltists maintain the view that the Slavic group of languages differs so radically from the neighboring Baltic group (Lithuanian,Latvian, and the now-extinctOld Prussian), that they could not have shared a parent language after the breakup of theProto-Indo-European continuum about five millennia ago. Substantial advances in Balto-Slavicaccentology 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 thatWest Baltic andEast Baltic differ from each other as much as each of them does from Proto-Slavic.[24]
TheProto-Slavic language existed until around AD 500. By the 7th century, it had broken apart into large dialectal zones.[citation needed] 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 oneOld East Slavic language ofKievan 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 inCentral 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, theFreising manuscripts show a language that contains some phonetic and lexical elements peculiar toSlovene dialects (e.g.rhotacism, the wordkrilatec). The Freising manuscripts are the firstLatin-script continuous text in a Slavic language.
The migration of Slavic speakers into the Balkans in the declining centuries of theByzantine Empire expanded the area of Slavic speech, but the pre-existing writing (notably Greek) survived in this area. The arrival of theHungarians inPannonia 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 inMoravia andLower Austria (Moravians) and those in present-dayStyria,Carinthia,East Tyrol inAustria, and in the provinces of modernSlovenia, where the ancestors of theSlovenes settled during first colonization.
Map and tree of Slavic languages, according to Kassian and A. Dybo
In September 2015, Alexei Kassian andAnna Dybo published,[26] as a part of interdisciplinary study of Slavic ethnogenesis,[27] 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[28] 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[29] and already not being monolithic.[30] 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 so-called Slavicization of Europe).[31][32][33][34]
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 (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),[original research?] 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 linguistAndrey 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,[35] but rather between the north-west (around modern Velikiy Novgorod and Pskov) and the center (around modernKyiv,Suzdal,Rostov,Moscow as well as Belarus) of the East Slavic territories.[36] TheOld 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.[37][38] According to Zaliznyak, the Russian language developed as a convergence of that dialect and the central ones,[39] whereas Ukrainian and Belarusian were continuation of development of the central dialects of East Slavs.[40]
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.[41][page needed]
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 (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.[42] According to them, the dialects of East Slavic tribes evolved gradually from the common Proto-Slavic language without any intermediate stages.[43]
Merger of *o and *a: PIE *a/*o, *ā/*ō → PS *a, *ā (→ CS *o, *a)
Law ofopen syllables: Allclosed syllables (syllables ending in a consonant) are eventually eliminated, in the following stages:
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 (→ CS *ǫ, *ę, *ę, *ǫ, *y). (NOTE: *ą *ę etc. indicates a nasalized vowel.)
In a cluster ofobstruent (stop or fricative) + another consonant, the obstruent is deleted unless the cluster can occur word-initially.
Vowel fronting: After *j or some other palatal sound, back vowels are fronted (*a, *ā, *u, *ū, *ai, *au → *e, *ē, *i, *ī, *ei, *eu). This leads to hard/soft alternations in noun and adjective declensions.
Prothesis: Before a word-initial vowel, *j or *w is usually inserted.
Second palatalization: *k, *g, *x → CS *c[ts], *dz, *ś before new *ē (from earlier *ai). *ś later splits into *š (West Slavic), *s (East/South Slavic).
Progressive palatalization (or "third palatalization"): *k, *g, *x → CS *c, *dz, *śafter *i, *ī in certain circumstances.
Vowel quality shifts: All pairs of long/short vowels become differentiated as well byvowel quality:
a, *ā → CS *o, *a
e, *ē → CS *e, *ě (originally a low-front sound[æ] but eventually raised to[ie] in most dialects, developing in divergent ways)
i, *u → CS *ь, *ъ (also written *ĭ, *ŭ; lax vowels as in the English wordspit, put)
The Slavic languages are a relatively homogeneous family, compared with other families ofIndo-European languages (e.g.Germanic,Romance, andIndo-Iranian). As late as the 10th century AD, the entire Slavic-speaking area still functioned as a single, dialectally differentiated language, termedCommon Slavic. Compared with most other Indo-European languages, the Slavic languages are quite conservative, particularly in terms ofmorphology (the means of inflecting nouns and verbs to indicate grammatical differences). Most Slavic languages have a rich,fusional morphology that conserves much of theinflectional morphology ofProto-Indo-European.[44] 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.[45]
Consonants
The following table shows the inventory of consonants of Late Common Slavic:[46]
1The sound/sʲ/ did not occur in West Slavic, where it had developed to/ʃ/.
This inventory of sounds is quite similar to what is found in most modern Slavic languages. The extensive series ofpalatal consonants, along with theaffricates *ts and *dz, developed through a series ofpalatalizations that happened during theProto-Slavic period, from earlier sequences either ofvelar consonants followed byfront vowels (e.g. *ke, *ki, *ge, *gi, *xe, and *xi), or of various consonants followed by *j (e.g. *tj, *dj, *sj, *zj, *rj, *lj, *kj, and *gj, where *j is thepalatal approximant ([j], the sound of the English letter "y" in "yes" or "you").
The biggest change in this inventory results from a furthergeneral palatalization occurring near the end of the Common Slavic period, whereall consonants became palatalized before front vowels. This produced a large number of new palatalized (or "soft") sounds, which formed pairs with the corresponding non-palatalized (or "hard") consonants[44] and absorbed the existing palatalized sounds*lʲ *rʲ *nʲ *sʲ. These sounds were best preserved in Russian but were lost to varying degrees in other languages (particularly Czech and Slovak). 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 fewconsonant clusters. However, as a result of the loss of certain formerly present vowels (the weakyers),the modern Slavic languages allow quite complex clusters, as in the Russian wordвзблеск[vzblʲesk] ("flash"). Also present in many Slavic languages are clusters rarely found cross-linguistically, as in Russianртуть[rtutʲ] ("mercury") or Polishmchu[mxu] ("moss", gen. sg.). The word for "mercury" with the initialrt- cluster, for example, is also found in the other East and West Slavic languages, although Slovak retains anepenthetic vowel (ortuť).[failed verification][47]
The sound[ɨ] occurs only in some languages (e.g. Russian and Belarusian), and even in these languages, it is often unclear whether it is its ownphoneme or anallophone of /i/. Nonetheless, it is a quite prominent and noticeable characteristic of the languages in which it is present.
Common Slavic also had twonasal vowels: *ę[ẽ] and *ǫ[õ]. However, these are preserved only in modern Polish (along with a few lesser-known dialects and microlanguages; seeYus for more details).
Other phonemic vowels are found in certain languages (e.g. theschwa/ə/ in Bulgarian and Slovenian, distincthigh-mid andlow-mid vowels in Slovenian, and the lax front vowel/ɪ/ in Ukrainian).
Length, accent, and tone
An area of great difference among Slavic languages is that ofprosody (i.e. syllabic distinctions such asvowel length,accent, andtone). Common Slavic had a complex system of prosody, inherited with little change fromProto-Indo-European. This consisted ofphonemic vowel length and a free, mobilepitch accent:
All vowels could occur either short or long, and this was phonemic (it could not automatically be predicted from other properties of the word).
There was (at most) a single accented syllable per word, distinguished by higher pitch (as in modernJapanese) rather than greater dynamic stress (as in English).
Vowels in accented syllables could be pronounced with either a rising or falling tone (i.e. there waspitch accent), and this was phonemic.
The accent wasfree in that it could occur on any syllable and was phonemic.
The accent wasmobile in that its position could potentially vary among closely related words within a single paradigm (e.g. the accent might land on a different syllable between the nominative and genitive singular of a given word).
Even within a given inflectional class (e.g. masculinei-stem nouns), 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 (pattern A), predominant accent on the ending (pattern B), or accent that moved between the root and ending (pattern C). In patterns B and C, the accent in different parts of the paradigm shifted not only in location but also type (rising vs. falling). 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 (even more so in the conservativeChakavian dialect); 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 astress accent (as in English) but preserved its position. As a result, the complexity of the mobile accent and the multiple accent patterns still exists (particularly in Russian because it has preserved the Common Slavic noun inflections, while Bulgarian has lost them).
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 (nom. sg., acc. sg., and/or gen. pl., depending on inflectional class) having a different length from the other forms. (Czech has a couple of other "mobile" patterns, but they are rare and can usually be substituted with one of the "normal" mobile patterns or a non-mobile pattern.)
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 (e.g.[o oː] >[ou]), with the result that some words have vowel-quality changes that exactly mirror the mobile-length patterns in Czech and Slovak.
Similarly, Slavic languages have extensive morphophonemic alternations in their derivational and inflectional morphology,[44] including between velar and postalveolar consonants, front and back vowels, and a vowel and no vowel.[48]
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.
Most languages of the formerSoviet Union and of some neighbouring countries (for example,Mongolian) aresignificantly influenced by Russian, especially in vocabulary. TheRomanian,Albanian, andHungarian 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 ancientIllyrians andVlachs on their way to theBalkans.[45]
Germanic languages
This sectionneeds expansion with: No discussion of areal interactions with Scandinavian languages. You can help bymaking an edit requestadding to it.(June 2024)
Max Vasmer, a specialist in Slavic etymology, has claimed that there were no Slavic loans intoProto-Germanic. However, there are isolated Slavic loans (mostly recent) into other Germanic languages. For example, the word for "border" (in modernGermanGrenze,Dutchgrens) was borrowed from the Common Slavicgranica. There are, however, many cities and villages of Slavic origin in Eastern Germany, the largest of which areBerlin,Leipzig andDresden. English derivesquark (a kind of cheese andsubatomic particle) from the GermanQuark, which in turn is derived from the Slavictvarog, which means "curd". Many German surnames, particularly in Eastern Germany and Austria, are Slavic in origin. TheNordic languages also havetorg/torv (market place) from Old Russiantъrgъ (trŭgŭ) or Polishtarg,[49]humle (hops),[50]räka/reke/reje (shrimp, prawn),[51]and, viaMiddle Low Germantolk (interpreter) from Old Slavictlŭkŭ,[52] andpråm/pram (barge) from West Slavonicpramŭ.[53]
Finno-Ugric languages
Finnic 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.[54] Many loanwords have acquired a Finnicized form, making it difficult to say whether such a word is natively Finnic or Slavic.[55]
Russian dialects have numerous borrowings fromFinno-Ugric languages, particularly for forest terms and geographical names.[56][57] This is related to the expansion in 7th to the 11th centuries AD ofSlavic people into the areas of Central Russia (nearMoscow) previously populated byFinno-Ugric peoples,[58] and the resulting genetic, cultural and linguistic exchange.
Other
TheCzech wordrobot is now found in most languages worldwide, and the wordpistol, probably also from Czech,[59] is found in many European languages.
A well-known Slavic word in almost all European languages isvodka, a borrowing from Russianводка (vodka,lit.'little water'), from common Slavicvoda ('water',cognate to the English wordwater) with thediminutive ending-ka.[60][a] Owing to the medievalfur trade with Northern Russia, Pan-European loans from Russian include such familiar words assable.[b] The English word "vampire" was borrowed (perhaps viaFrenchvampire) fromGermanVampir, in turn derived from Serbo-Croatianвампир (vampir), continuingProto-Slavic*ǫpyrь,[61][62][63][64][65][66][c] althoughPolish scholar K. Stachowski has argued that the origin of the word is early Slavic*vąpěrь, going back to Turkicoobyr.[67]
The following tree for the Slavic languages derives from theEthnologue report for Slavic languages.[68] It includes theISO 639-1 andISO 639-3 codes where available.
Map of all areas where theRussian language is the language spoken by the majority of the populationSouth Slavic dialect continuum with major dialect groupsWest Slavic dialect continuum with major dialect groups
Interslavic language, a modernized and simplified form of Old Church Slavonic, largely based on material that the modern Slavic languages have in common. Its purpose is to facilitate communication between representatives of different Slavic nations and to enable people who do not know any Slavic language to communicate with Slavs. Because Old Church Slavonic had become too archaic and complex for everyday communication,Pan-Slavic language projects have been created from the 17th century onwards in order to provide the Slavs with a common literary language. Interslavic in its current form was standardized in 2011 after the merger of several older projects.[71]
^Siewierska, Anna and Uhliřová, Ludmila. "An overview of word order in Slavic languages". 1 Constituent Order in the Languages of Europe, edited by Anna Siewierska, Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 1998, pp. 105-150.https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110812206.105
^Ivanov 2021, section 2: "The Slavic language group is classified into three branches: (1) the South Slavic branch, with its two subgroups Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian-Slovene and Bulgarian-Macedonian, (2) the West Slavic branch, with its three subgroups Czech-Slovak, Sorbian, and Lekhitic (Polish and related tongues), and (3) the East Slavic branch, comprising Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian".
^Fesenmeier, L., Heinemann, S., & Vicario, F. (2014). "The mutual intelligibility of Slavic languages as a source of support for the revival of the Sorbian language" [Sprachminderheiten: gestern, heute, morgen- Minoranze linguistiche: ieri, oggi, domani]. In Language minorities: yesterday, today, tomorrow. Peter Lang.https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-653-04817-9/11
^Fischer, A., Jágrová, K., Stenger, I., Avgustinova, T., Klakow, D., & Marti, R. (2016). Orthographic and morphological correspondences between related Slavic languages as a base for modeling of mutual intelligibility. 10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2016.
^Fischer, A. K., Jagrova, K., Stenger, I., Avgustinova, T., Klakow, D., & Marti, R. (2016, 2016/05/01). LREC - Orthographic and Morphological Correspondences between Related Slavic Languages as a Base for Modeling of Mutual Intelligibility.
^Golubovic, J., & Gooskens, C. (2015). "Mutual intelligibility between West and South Slavic languages". Russian Linguistics, 39(3), 351-373.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-015-9150-9
^Kyjánek, L., & Haviger, J. (2019). "The Measurement of Mutual Intelligibility between West-Slavic Languages" [Article]. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 26(3), 205-230.https://doi.org/10.1080/09296174.2018.1464546
^Lindsay, R. (2014). "Mutual intelligibility of languages in the Slavic family". Academia. Stenger, I., Avgustinova, T., & Marti, R. (2017). "Levenshtein distance and word adaptation surprisal as methods of measuring mutual intelligibility in reading comprehension of Slavic languages". Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies: International Conference 'Dialogue 2017' Proceedings, 16, 304-317.https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85021828413&partnerID=40&md5=c9a8557c3da885eb1be39898bfacf6e4
^Golubović, J., Gooskens, C. (2015). "Mutual intelligibility between West and South Slavic languages" [Article]. Russian Linguistics, 39(3), 351-373.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-015-9150-9
^Novotná & Blažek 2007, p. 185–210: ""Classical glottochronology" conducted by Czech Slavist M. Čejka in 1974 dates the Balto-Slavic split to −910±340 BCE, Sergei Starostin in 1994 dates it to 1210 BCE, and "recalibrated glottochronology" conducted by Novotná & Blažek dates it to 1400–1340 BCE. This agrees well with Trziniec-Komarov culture, localized from Silesia to Central Ukraine and dated to the period 1500–1200 BCE".
^Kapović 2008, p. 94: "Kako rekosmo, nije sigurno je li uopće bilo prabaltijskoga jezika. Čini se da su dvije posvjedočene, preživjele grane baltijskoga, istočna i zapadna, različite jedna od druge izvorno kao i svaka posebno od praslavenskoga".
^Zaliznyak 2012, section 111: "…ростовско-суздальско-рязанская языковая зона от киевско-черниговской ничем существенным в древности не отличалась. Различия возникли позднее, они датируются сравнительно недавним, по лингвистическим меркам, временем, начиная с XIV–XV вв […the Rostov-Suzdal-Ryazan language area did not significantly differ from the Kiev-Chernigov one. Distinctions emerged later, in a relatively recent, by linguistic standards, time, starting from the 14th-15th centuries]".
^Zaliznyak 2012, section 88: "Северо-запад — это была территория Новгорода и Пскова, а остальная часть, которую можно назвать центральной, или центрально-восточной, или центрально-восточно-южной, включала одновременно территорию будущей Украины, значительную часть территории будущей Великороссии и территории Белоруссии … Существовал древненовгородский диалект в северо-западной части и некоторая более нам известная классическая форма древнерусского языка, объединявшая в равной степени Киев, Суздаль, Ростов, будущую Москву и территорию Белоруссии [The territory of Novgorod and Pskov was in the north-west, while the remaining part, which could either be called central, or central-eastern, or central-eastern-southern, comprised the territory of the future Ukraine, a substantial part of the future Great Russia, and the territory of Belarus … The Old Novgorodian dialect existed in the north-western part, while a somewhat more well-known classical variety of the Old Russian language united equally Kiev, Suzdal, Rostov, the future Moscow and the territory of Belarus]".
^Zaliznyak 2012, section 82: "…черты новгородского диалекта, отличавшие его от других диалектов Древней Руси, ярче всего выражены не в позднее время, когда, казалось бы, они могли уже постепенно развиться, а в самый древний период […features of the Novgorodian dialect, which made it different from the other dialects of the Old Rus', were most pronounced not in later times, when they seemingly could have evolved, but in the oldest period]".
^Zaliznyak 2012, section 92: "…северо-западная группа восточных славян представляет собой ветвь, которую следует считать отдельной уже на уровне праславянства […north-western group of the East Slavs is a branch that should be regarded as separate already in the Proto-Slavic period]".
^Zaliznyak 2012, section 94: "…великорусская территория оказалась состоящей из двух частей, примерно одинаковых по значимости: северо-западная (новгородско-псковская) и центрально-восточная (Ростов, Суздаль, Владимир, Москва, Рязань) […the Great Russian territory happened to include two parts of approximately equal importance: the north-western one (Novgorod-Pskov) and the central-eastern-southern one (Rostov, Suzdal, Vladimir, Moscow, Ryazan)]".
^Zaliznyak 2012, section 94: "…нынешняя Украина и Белоруссия — наследники центрально-восточно-южной зоны восточного славянства, более сходной в языковом отношении с западным и южным славянством […today's Ukraine and Belarus are successors of the central-eastern-southern area of the East Slavs, more linguistically similar to the West and South Slavs]".
^Teush, O. À. (2019). "Borrowed names of forest and forest loci in the Russian dialects of the European North of Russia: Lexemes of Baltic-Finnish origin" [Article]. Bulletin of Ugric Studies, 9(2), 297-317.https://doi.org/10.30624/2220-4156-2019-9-2-297-317
^Teush, O. А. (2019). "Borrowed names of forest and forest loci in the Russian dialects of European North of Russia: Lexemes of Sami and Volga-Finnish origin" [Article]. Bulletin of Ugric Studies, 9(3), 485-498.https://doi.org/10.30624/2220-4156-2019-9-3-485-49
Duličenko, A. D. (1994). "Kleinschriftsprachen in der slawischen Sprachenwelt" [Minor Languages in the Slavic Language World].Zeitschrift für Slawistik (in German).39 (4).doi:10.1524/slaw.1994.39.4.560.S2CID170747896.
Ivanov, Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich (16 March 2021). Ray, Michael; et al. (eds.)."Slavic languages".Encyclopedia Britannica.
Sussex, Roland; Cubberley, Paul (2006).The Slavic languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sedov, Valentin V. (1995).Slavyane v rannem srednevekov'yeСлавяне в раннем средневековье [Slavs in the Early Middle Ages] (in Russian). Moscow: Fond Arheologii.
Sedov, Valentin V. (1979).Proishozhdenie i rannyaya istoria slavyanПроисхождение и ранняя история славян [The Origin and Early History of Slavs] (in Russian). Moscow: Nauka.
Curta, F. (2001).The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heather, P. (2010).Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nimchuk, V. V. (2001). "9.1. Mova"9.1. Мова [9.1. The Language]. In Smoliy, V. A. (ed.).Istoriia ukrains'koi kul'turyІсторія української культури [A History of the Ukrainian Culture] (in Ukrainian). Vol. 1. Kyiv: Naukova Dumka. Retrieved28 December 2022.
"Vodka".Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary. Retrieved28 December 2022.
"Vampyr" [Vampire].Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm, digitalisierte Fassung im Wörterbuchnetz des Trier Center for Digital Humanities [The German Dictionary by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Digitized Edition in Wörterbuchnetz of the Trier Center for Digital Humanities]. 01/23 (in German). Wörterbuchnetz. 2023. Retrieved19 February 2023.
Dauzat, Albert (1938).Dictionnaire étymologique [Etymological Dictionary] (in French). Librairie Larousse.
Pfeifer, Wolfgang (2006).Etymologisches Wörterbuch [Etymological Dictionary] (in German). p. 1494.
Skok, Petar (1974).Etimologijski rjecnk hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika [Etymological dictionary of the Croatian or Serbian language] (in Serbo-Croatian).
Tokarev, S. A. (1982).Mify narodov miraМифы народов мира [Myths of the Peoples of the World] (in Russian). Vol. 1. Sovetskaya Entsiklopedia.
Vasmer, Max (1953).Russisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch [Russian Etymological Dictionary] (in German). Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.
Stachowski, Kamil (2005). "Wampir na rozdrożach. Etymologia wyrazu upiór – wampir w językach słowiańskich" [A vampire at the crossroads. The etymology of the word "upiór" - vampire in Slavic languages].Rocznik Slawistyczny (in Polish).55. Wrocław:73–92.
.svg)
![[icon]](/mt/?noimg=&dark=on&url=http%3a%2f%2fen.wikipedia.org%2fwiki%2fFile%3aWiki_letter_w_cropped.svg)
