Slavic (American English) orSlavonic (British English)studies, also known asSlavistics, is the academic field of area studies concerned withSlavic peoples, languages, history, and culture. Originally, a Slavist or Slavicist was primarily alinguist orphilologist researching Slavistics. Increasingly, historians, social scientists, and other humanists who study Slavic cultures and societies have been included in this rubric.
In the United States, Slavic studies is dominated byRussian studies.Ewa Thompson, a professor of Slavic studies atRice University, described the situation of non-Russian Slavic studies as "invisible and mute".[1]
Slavistics emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, simultaneously withRomantic nationalism among various Slavic nations, and ideological attempts to establish a common sense of Slavic community, exemplified by thePan-Slavist movement. Among the first scholars to use the term wasJosef Dobrovský (1753–1829).
The history of Slavic studies can be divided into three periods. Until 1876 the early Slavists concentrated on documentation and printing of monuments of Slavic languages, among them the first texts written in national languages. At this time the majority of Slavic languages received their first modern dictionaries, grammars, and compendia. The second period, ending with World War I, featured the rapid development of Slavic philology and linguistics, most notably outside of Slavic countries themselves, in the circles formed aroundAugust Schleicher (1821–1868) and aroundAugust Leskien (1840–1916) at theUniversity of Leipzig. At this time, Slavonic scholars focused ondialectology.
After World War II, centers of Slavic studies were created at various universities around the world, with much greater expansion into other humanities and social science disciplines. This development was partly due to political concerns in Western Europe and the North America arising from the Cold War. Slavic studies flourished in the years from World War II into the 1990s, though university enrollments in Slavic languages have declined since then.
Following the traditional division of Slavs into three subgroups (eastern, southern, western), Slavic studies are divided into three distinct subfields:
East Slavic studies, encompassing the study of East Slavic peoples and their linguistic, literary, and other cultural and historical heritages.
^Kassianova (2002), p. 1001[permanent dead link]: "Rusinistica, or Carpatho-Rusyn studies - a social science discipline focusing on the history of an Eastern Slavic people inhabiting the northern and southern slope of the Carpathian mountains and living within the borders of several Eastern and Central European countries."
