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The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the Early Middle Ages, which in turn is thought to have descended from the earlier Proto-Balto-Slavic language, linking the Slavic languages to the Baltic ...
Most languages of the former Soviet Union and of some neighbouring countries (for example, Mongolian) are significantly influenced by Russian, especially in vocabulary.The Romanian, Albanian, and Hungarian 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 ...
The Balto-Slavic languages form a branch of the Indo-European family of languages, traditionally comprising the Baltic and Slavic languages. Baltic and Slavic languages share several linguistic traits not found in any other Indo-European branch, [ 3 ] which points to a period of common development and origin.
Despite the 'nationalisation' of the language in the four countries, "lexical differences between the ethnic variants are extremely limited, even when compared with those between closely related Slavic languages (such as standard Czech and Slovak, Bulgarian and Macedonian), and grammatical differences are even less pronounced.
After the conversion of the East Slavic region to Christianity the people used service books borrowed from Bulgaria, which were written in Old Church Slavonic (a South Slavic language). [12] The Church Slavonic language was strictly used only in text, while the colloquial language of the Bulgarians was communicated in its spoken form. [citation ...
The earliest scholar to notice the similarities between Balkan languages belonging to different families was the Slovenian scholar Jernej Kopitar in 1829. [4] August Schleicher (1850) [5] more explicitly developed the concept of areal relationships as opposed to genetic ones, and Franz Miklosich (1861) [6] studied the relationships of Balkan Slavic and Romance more extensively.
The South Slavic languages were greatly influenced by Greek beginning in the Early Middle Ages, through translation of Byzantine works, leaving religious, philosophical and psychological terms. [10] Late medieval speech had very few loanwords, rather replacing Greek words with calques for linguistical purity. [ 10 ]
Serbo-Croatian, 21 million speakers (est.), including second language speakers Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Montenegrin standards with dialectal differences; Bulgarian, 9 million (2005–12) Slovene, 2.5 million speakers (2010) Macedonian, 1.4–3.5 million speakers (1986–2011) Church Slavonic (liturgical)