The history of the Slavic languages stretches over 3000 years, from the point at which the ancestral Proto-Balto-Slavic language broke up (c. 1500 BC) into the modern-day Slavic languages which are today natively spoken in Eastern, Central and Southeastern Europe as well as parts of North Asia and Central Asia.
The first 2000 years or so consist of the pre-Slavic era: a long, stable period of gradual development during which the language remained unified, with no discernible dialectal differences.
The last stage in which the language remained without internal differences can be dated to around 500 AD and is sometimes termed Proto-Slavic proper or Early Proto-Slavic. Following this is the Common Slavic period (c. 500–1000 AD), during which the first dialectal differences appeared but the entire Slavic-speaking area continued to function as a single language, with sound changes tending to spread throughout the entire area.
By around 1000 AD, the area had broken up into separate East Slavic, West Slavic and South Slavic languages, and in the following centuries, i.e. 11–14th century, it broke up further into the various modern Slavic languages, of which the following are extant: Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn and Ukrainian in the East; Czech, Slovak, Polish, Kashubian and the Sorbian languages in the West, and Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian and Slovene in the South.
The period from the early centuries AD to the end of the Common Slavic period around 1000 AD was a time of rapid change, concurrent with the explosive growth of the Slavic-speaking era. By the end of this period, most of the features of the modern Slavic languages had been established.
The first historical documentation of the Slavic languages is found in isolated names and words in Greek documents starting in the 6th century AD, when Slavic-speaking tribes first came in contact with the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire.
The first continuous texts date from the late 9th century AD and were written in Old Church Slavonic—the first Slavic literary language, based on the South Slavic dialects spoken around Thessaloniki in Greek Macedonia—as part of the Christianization of the Slavs by Saints Cyril and Methodius and their followers. Because these texts were written during the Common Slavic period, the language they document is close to the ancestral Proto-Slavic language and is critically important to the linguistic reconstruction of Slavic-language history.
This article covers the development of the Slavic languages from the end of the Common Slavic period (c. 1000 AD) to the present time. See the article on Proto-Slavic for a description of the Proto-Slavic language of the late first millennium AD, and history of Proto-Slavic for the earlier linguistic history of this language.
Origin
The development into Proto-Slavic probably occurred along the southern periphery of the Proto-Balto-Slavic continuum. This is concluded from Slavic hydronyms, the most archaic of which are found between the northeastern rim of the Carpathian mountains in the west, along the middle Dnieper, the Pripet, and the upper Dniester river in the east.
From around 500 BCE to 200 CE, the Scythians and then the Sarmatians expanded their control into the forest steppe. Consequently, a few Eastern Iranian loan words, especially relating to religious and cultural practices, have been seen as evidence of cultural influences. Subsequently, loan words of Germanic origin also appear. This is connected to the movement of east Germanic groups into the Vistula basin, and subsequently to the middle Dnieper basin, associated with the appearance of the Przeworsk and Chernyakhov cultures, respectively.
Into the Common Era, the various Balto-Slavic dialects formed a dialect continuum stretching from the Vistula to the Don and Oka basins, and from the Baltic and upper Volga to southern Russia and northern Ukraine. Beginning around 500 CE, the Slavic speakers rapidly expanded in all directions from a homeland in eastern Poland and western Ukraine. By the eighth century CE, Proto-Slavic is believed to have been spoken uniformly from Thessaloniki to Novgorod.
Notation
See Proto-Balto-Slavic language#Notation for much more detail on the uses of the most commonly encountered diacritics for indicating prosody (á, à, â, ã, ȁ, a̋, ā, ă) and various other phonetic distinctions (ą, ẹ, ė, š, ś, etc.) in different Balto-Slavic languages.
Vowel notation Two different and conflicting systems for denoting vowels are commonly in use in Indo-European and Balto-Slavic linguistics on the one hand, and Slavic linguistics on the other. In the first, vowel length is consistently distinguished with a macron above the letter, while in the latter it is not clearly indicated. The following table explains these differences:
Vowel IE/B-S Slavic Short front closed vowel (front yer) i ĭ or ь Short back closed vowel (back yer) u ŭ or ъ Short back open vowel a o Long front closed vowel ī i Long back closed vowel ū y Long front open vowel (yat) ē ě Long back open vowel ā a
For consistency, all discussions of sounds up to (but not including) Middle Common Slavic use the common Balto-Slavic notation of vowels, while discussions of Middle and Late Common Slavic (the phonology and grammar sections) and later dialects use the Slavic notation.
Other vowel and consonant diacritics Other marks used within Balto-Slavic and Slavic linguistics are: The haček on consonants (č š ž), indicating a "hushing" quality , as in English kitchen, mission, vision. Various strongly palatal or palatalized consonants (a more "hissing" quality) usually indicated by an acute accent (ć ǵ ḱ ĺ ń ŕ ś ź) or a haček (ď ľ ň ř ť). The ogonek (ą ę ǫ), indicating vowel nasalization (in modern standard Lithuanian this is historic only).
Prosodic notation For Middle and Late Common Slavic, the following marks are used to indicate prosodic distinctions, based on the standard notation in Serbo-Croatian: Long rising (á): This indicates the Balto-Slavic acute accent in Middle Common Slavic only. Short rising (à): This indicates the Balto-Slavic acute accent in Late Common Slavic, where it was shortened. Long falling (ȃ): This normally indicates the Balto-Slavic circumflex accent. In Late Common Slavic, it also indicates originally short (falling) accent that was lengthened in monosyllables. This secondary circumflex occurs only on the short vowels e, o, ь, ъ in an open syllable (i.e. when not forming part of a liquid diphthong). Short falling (ȁ): This indicates the Balto-Slavic short accent. In Late Common Slavic, this accent was lengthened in monosyllables (see preceding entry). Neoacute (ã): This indicates the Late Common Slavic neoacute accent, which was pronounced as a rising accent, usually long but short when occurring on some syllable types in certain languages. This results from retraction of the accent, i.e. the Middle Common Slavic accent fell on the following syllable (usually specifically a weak yer).
Other prosodic diacritics There are multiple competing systems used to indicate prosody in different Balto-Slavic languages (see Proto-Balto-Slavic language#Notation for more details). The most important for this article are: Three-way system of Proto-Slavic, Proto-Balto-Slavic, modern Lithuanian: Acute tone (á) vs. circumflex tone (ȃ or ã) vs. short accent (à). Four-way Serbo-Croatian system, also used in Slovene and often in Slavic reconstructions: long rising (á), short rising (à), long falling (ȃ), short falling (ȁ). In the Chakavian dialect and other archaic dialects, the long rising accent is notated with a tilde (ã), indicating its normal origin in the Late Common Slavic neoacute accent (see above). Length only, as in Czech and Slovak: long (á) vs. short (a). Stress only, as in Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian: stressed (á) vs. unstressed (a).
Dialectal differentiation The breakup of Common Slavic was gradual and many sound changes (such as the second regressive palatalization) still propagated throughout what must have been by then a dialect continuum. However, several changes were more restricted, or had different outcomes.
The end of the Common Slavic period occurred with the loss of the yers (weak high vowels, derived from Proto-Balto-Slavic and ultimately Proto-Indo-European *i and *u). This ended the era of syllabic synharmony (when most, originally all, syllables were open) by creating large numbers of closed syllables. The conditions for which yers were strong and which ones weak is the same across most or all Slavic languages, but the particular outcomes are drastically different.
The clusters *tl and *dl were lost in all but West Slavic, being normally simplified to *l. Exceptions are some Northern Russian dialects where they instead changed to *kl and *gl respectively (today only traces of this remain) and the Gail Valley dialect of Slovene (with traces in other Carinthian dialects).
For many Common Slavic dialects—including most of West Slavic, all but the northernmost portions of East Slavic, and some western parts of South Slavic—Proto-Slavic lenited from a voiced velar plosive to a voiced velar fricative ( → ). This remains in some modern languages: for example, Czech and Slovak , Belarusian , Ukrainian , which developed from Proto-Slavic . Because this change was not universal and because it did not occur for a number of East Slavic dialects (such as Belarusian and South Russian) until after the application of Havlík's law, calls into question early projections of this change and postulates three independent instigations of lenition, dating the earliest to before 900 CE and the latest to the early thirteenth century.
Overview of languages
The Slavic languages are generally divided into East Slavic, South Slavic and West Slavic. For most comparative purposes, however, South Slavic does not function as a unit. Bulgarian and Macedonian, while quite similar to each other, are radically different from the other South Slavic languages in phonology and grammar. The phonology of Bulgarian and Macedonian is similar to East Slavic rather than their nearest Slavic neighbor Serbo-Croatian (suggesting an early East–West divide across the whole Slavic territory, before South Slavic was separated from the rest of the Slavic languages by the spread of Hungarian and Romanian). In grammar, Bulgarian and Macedonian have developed distinctly from all other Slavic languages, eliminating nearly all case distinctions (strongly preserved elsewhere), but preserving and even strengthening the older Indo-European aspectual system consisting of synthetic aorist and imperfect tenses (largely eliminated elsewhere in favor of the new Slavic aspectual system).
Old Church Slavonic (OCS) data are especially important for the reconstruction of Late Common Slavic (LCS). The major exception is LCS accent, which can only be reconstructed from modern Slavic dialects.
Palatalization At least six separate sound changes involving palatalization can be identified in the history of the Slavic languages: Satemization, which converted Proto-Indo-European (PIE) front velars *ḱ, *ǵ, *ǵh into Balto-Slavic *ś, *ź, *ź, and further into Slavic *s, *z, *z. The first regressive palatalization of velars. The second regressive palatalization of velars. The progressive palatalization of velars. Iotation, which palatalized all consonants before *j. General palatalization of all consonants before front vowels (not in all languages).
The first palatalization (satemization) is reflected in all Balto-Slavic languages, while the rest are represented in nearly all Slavic languages. (The Old Novgorod dialect did not undergo the second regressive palatalization, and underwent the progressive palatalization only partly.)
Velar palatalization outcomes