[Note: This article is out-of-date in its statics.]
The Slavic, or Slavonic, languages belong to the northwestern branch of the satem, or eastern division, of the INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES. Toward the end of the 3d millennium BC, Indo-European settlers migrated from the Caucasus westward into Europe and passed to either side of the Carpathian Mountains. Those settlers who went southward along the Danube developed the Germanic, Italic, and Illyrian families of languages; those to the north inhabited a territory bounded by the Baltic Sea on the north, the Oder on the west, and the Dnepr on the east. Two language families began to consolidate in this area: the BALTIC LANGUAGES, along the coast and eastward into northern and eastern Poland; and the Slavic languages, farther south, between the upper Vistula and middle Dnepr basins. Archaeological evidence fails to suggest any sharp cultural divisions between the speakers of these two language families, who remained isolated from the other European settlers until the 1st millennium BC, when various tribes, such as the Celts and the Goths, began to traverse their territory. To this day the Baltic and Slavic languages have preserved a number of common linguistic features, many of which go back to an older Indo-European prototype.
In the 5th and 6th centuries AD, after the collapse (453) of the Hunnish empire, the Slavic peoples migrated south and east through and around the Carpathians, north into the upper Dnepr region, and west as far as the Elbe. Three main linguistic branches crystallized as a result of the migrations. One was the West Slavic branch, comprising Polabian (extinct since the 18th century, spoken in the Elbe region); Kashubian (spoken on the left bank of the lower Vistula); Slovincian (which survived into the 20th century in the Stolp district of Poland); Polish (with 40 million speakers in present-day Poland); High and Low Sorbian (also called Lusatian or Wendish, still used by about 120,000 speakers on the upper Spree in East Germany); Czech (11 million speakers); and Slovak (5 million speakers in present-day Czechoslovakia). The second branch is known as South Slavic. It comprises Serbo-Croatian (19 million speakers in present-day Yugoslavia); Slovenian (2 million speakers in northwest Yugoslavia); Macedonian (2 million speakers in southeast Yugoslavia); and Bulgarian (9 million speakers in present-day Bulgaria). The third is the East Slavic branch, within the USSR, and comprises Russian (142 million speakers); Ukrainian (43 million); and Belorussian (11 million).
Many Slavs reside in the United States and other countries beyond the Slavic geographical territory. In 1969, 5,100,000 persons living in the United States claimed Polish ancestry, 550,000 of whom were born abroad; of the 2,200,000 Russians now in the United States, 417,000 were born abroad.
By the 9th century the Slavic peoples were spread over a wide geographical area, yet they still spoke a common language with only minor differences in dialect. No credible evidence attests to Slavic writing prior to the 860s, when Prince Rostislav of Moravia requested teachers "in our own language" from Byzantium. The two brothers who headed this mission, Constantine (Saint Cyril, 827-869) and Methodius (826-885), created a Slavic alphabet, Glagolitic, and began to translate church books and homiletic and liturgical texts. Before Methodius's death, many translations and even original works, including poetry, had been written in the new literary language, called Old Church Slavonic. Near the end of the 9th century, Glagolitic was replaced by Cyrillic, derived primarily from the Greek uncial script.
In the South Slavic territory, a progressively modified Church Slavonic remained the exclusive written language for the orthodox Serbs, Macedonians, and Bulgars, and for some Croatian Catholics. The Slovenes replaced Church Slavonic with the vernacular in the 16th century, and the Serbs did so early in the 19th. By 1850 a common Serbo-Croatian literary language had been elaborated, written by the Croats in the Latin alphabet and by the Serbs in Cyrillic. Modern Bulgarian emerged in the mid-19th century, Macedonian after World War II.
Old Church Slavonic was suppressed in the West as early as the 11th century; consequently the West Slavic languages use a Latin alphabet. Church Slavonic was used in the East, however, well into the 18th century. In Russian the modern literary language grew from an enrichment of the vernacular through Church Slavonic; by contrast, the Ukrainians based their language primarily on the vernacular.
The language used by all Slavic peoples before their historical period, called Common Slavic, still conserved most of the Indo-European case system, although the ablative had merged with the genitive. In addition to the singular and plural numbers, Old Church Slavonic also had a dual number, preserved today only in Slovenian and Sorbian, although residues of the nominal dual still denote substantives that follow the numbers two, three, and four in Russian and Serbo-Croatian and any number in Bulgarian. Slavic substantives and adjectives still have masculine, feminine, and neuter genders in the singular, but the gender distinctions are lost in the plural in Russian and Bulgarian and have weakened in the other modern languages. Word order has remained relatively free in Slavic, in contrast to English, for example, where the noun before the verb is the subject, the noun following, the object.
In the 18th century, Slavic scholars realized that their languages possessed a grammatical category not shared to any appreciable extent by other Indo-European languages: verbal aspect. Every verb is classified today as belonging either to the marked, or perfective, aspect or to the unmarked, or imperfective, aspect. A perfective verb focuses attention on a certain phase or aspect of the verbal action--the onset of action, for example, or its completion, or the action taken as a whole. An imperfective verb simply describes the verbal action with no particular focal point. Of the six Indo-European tenses--present, future, imperfect, aorist, perfect, and pluperfect--Common Slavic preserved the present and the aorist. The old imperfect and perfect were replaced by a new imperfect, and the Indo-European future was replaced by the present tense form of the perfective verb. The new perfective form singles out some aspect of the verbal action that did not take place prior to the moment of speech and that is therefore intended by the speaker to take place afterward, usually sometime in the future. A periphrastic future found in the East and West Slavic languages expresses a future action without focal point. In the South Slavic languages, the future can only be formed through the help of an auxiliary verb or particle.
Old Church Slavonic possessed an elaborate set of verb forms--up to 236 for an imperfective verb. All but Eastern Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian have lost the aorist and imperfect tenses. In these languages the old perfect has come to signify a past action not witnessed by the speaker; the perfect form is used in the other Slavic languages to signify a nonpresent tense, most commonly the past, but it is also used in conjunction with an auxiliary form to denote the conditional (as in Russian or Czech) or even the future (as in Slovenian).
Word accent was free in Common Slavic. Pitch was distinctive, so that the stress was fixed upon a long syllable with rising pitch, if there was such a syllable; if not, then the stress fell upon the first syllable of the word or word unit. Russian and the East Slavic languages abolished pitch in favor of free, or distinctive, stress, as did Bulgarian. Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian retained, with subsequent changes, a system of distinctive pitch. Czech and Polish abolished both stress and pitch, the former having nondistinctive stress on the initial syllable, the latter on the penultimate syllable.
In addition to the national or standard literary language taught in schools, the linguistic territory of each Slavic language includes many regional dialects. The dialects form a continuum not only among one another but also across political boundaries, so that, for example, the East Slovak dialect represents a linguistic compromise with its bordering West Ukrainian dialect.
The Slavic lexicon is primarily Indo-European in origin. Some words are common to Baltic and Slavic, and there are ancient borrowings from Iranian, mostly of a spiritual nature, and from Germanic, usually of material items. Czech and Polish show the influence of later contact with Germanic peoples, and the South Slavic languages reflect contact with the Turks. There are loan words from Greek in the East and from Latin in the West, and there are many inter-Slavic borrowings.
LAWRENCE W. NEWMAN
Brecht, Richard D., and Chvany, Catherine V., eds., Slavic Transformational Syntax (1974);
De Bray, Reginald, Guide to the Slavonic Languages (1969);
Herman, Louis Jay, A Dictionary of Slavic Word Families (1975);
Jakobson, Roman, Slavic Languages: A Condensed Survey (1955);
Lunt, Horace G., Old Church Slavonic Grammar (1959);
Shevelov, George Y., A Prehistory of Slavic (1965);
Townsend, Charles E., Russian Word-Formation, rev. ed. (1975).