Interslavic ( / ) is a pan-Slavic auxiliary language. Its purpose is to facilitate communication between speakers of various Slavic languages, as well as to allow people who do not speak a Slavic language to communicate with Slavic speakers by being mutually intelligible with most, if not all, Slavic languages. For Slavs and non-Slavs, it can be used for educational purposes as well. Its use spans a broad range of fields, including tourism and education.
Interslavic can be classified as a semi-constructed language. It is essentially a modern continuation of Old Church Slavonic, and also draws on the various improvised language forms that Slavs have used for centuries to communicate between nationalities, for example in multi-Slavic environments and on the Internet, providing them with a scientific base. Thus, both grammar and vocabulary are based on common elements between the Slavic languages. Its main focus lies on instant intelligibility rather than easy learning, a balance typical for naturalistic (as opposed to schematic) languages.
The Interslavic project began in 2006 under the name Slovianski. In 2011, Slovianski underwent a thorough reform and merged with two other projects, with the result called "Interslavic", a name that was first proposed by the Czech Ignác Hošek in 1908.Л.П. Рупосова, История межславянского языка, in: Вестник Московского государственного областного университета (Московский государственный областной университет, 2012 no. 1, p. 55.
Like the languages of the Slavic language family, Interslavic is generally written using either Latin or Cyrillic letters, or on rare occasions the Glagolitic script.
History
Precursors of Interslavic have a long history and predate constructed languages like Volapük and Esperanto by centuries: the oldest description, written by the Croatian priest Juraj Križanić, goes back to the years 1659–1666.М.И. Исаев, Словарь этнолингистическиж понятий и терминов. Moscow, 2001, pp. 85–86.
The history of Pan-Slavic language projects is closely connected with Pan-Slavism, an ideology that endeavors cultural and political unification of all Slavs, based on the conception that all Slavic people are part of a single Slavic nation. Along with this belief came also the need for a Slavic umbrella language. Old Church Slavonic had partly served this role in previous centuries, as an administrative language in a large part of the Slavic world, and it was still used on a large scale in Orthodox liturgy, where it played a role similar to Latin in the West. A strong candidate for a more modern language is Russian, the language of the largest (and during most of the 19th century the only) Slavic-speaking majority country and also mother tongue of more than half of Slavic speakers. However, the role of the Russian language as a lingua franca in Eastern Europe and the Balkans diminished after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In March 2006, the Slovianski project was started by a group of people from different countries, who felt the need for a simple and neutral Slavic language that the Slavs could understand without prior learning. The language they envisioned should be naturalistic and only consist of material existing in all or most Slavic languages, without any artificial additions.Bojana Barlovac, Creation of 'One Language for All Slavs' Underway. BalkanInsight, 18 February 2010. Initially, Slovianski was being developed in two different variants: a naturalistic version known as Slovianski-N (initiated by Jan van Steenbergen and further developed by Igor Polyakov), and a more simplified version known as Slovianski-P (initiated by Ondrej Rečnik and further developed by Gabriel Svoboda). The difference was that Slovianski-N had six grammatical cases, while Slovianski-P—like English, Bulgarian and Macedonian—used prepositions instead. Apart from these two variants (N stands for naturalism, P for pidgin or prosti "simple"), a schematic version, Slovianski-S, has been experimented with as well, but was abandoned in an early stage of the project. In 2009 it was decided that only the naturalistic version would be continued under the name Slovianski. Although Slovianski had three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), six cases and full conjugation of verbs—features usually avoided in international auxiliary languages—a high level of simplification was achieved by means of simple, unambiguous endings and irregularity being kept to a minimum.
Slovianski was mostly used in Internet traffic and in a newsletter, Slovianska Gazeta.Н. М. Малюга, "Мовознавство в питаннях і відповідях для вчителя й учнів 5 класу", in: Філологічні студії. Науковий вісник Криворізького державного педагогічного університету. Збірник наукових праць, випуск 1. Kryvyj Rih, 2008, , p. 147. Алина Петропавловская, Славянское эсперанто . Европейский русский альянс, 23 June 2007. In February and March 2010 there was much publicity about Slovianski after articles had been dedicated to it on the Polish internet portal Interia.plZiemowit Szczerek, Języki, które mają zrozumieć wszyscy Słowianie . Interia.pl, 13 February 2010. and the Serbian newspaper Večernje novosti.Marko Prelević, Словијански да свако разуме. Večernje Novosti, 18 February 2010. Shortly thereafter, articles about Slovianski appeared in the Slovak newspaper Pravda, on the news site of the Czech broadcasting station ČT24, in the Serbian blogosphere. Worldwide Translations, 1 November 2014. and the Serbian edition of Reader's Digest,Gordana Knežević, Slovianski bez muke. Reader's Digest Srbija, June 2010, pp. 13–15. as well as other newspapers and internet portals in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Ukraine.Klára Ward, „Kvik Kvik“ alebo Zvieracia farma po slovensky . Z Druhej Strany, 25 February 2010. Péter Aranyi & Klára Tomanová, Egységes szláv nyelv születőben . Melano.hu, 23 February 2010.
Slovianski has played a role in the development of other, related projects as well. Rozumio (2008) and Slovioski (2009) were both efforts to build a bridge between Slovianski and Slovio. Originally, Slovioski, developed by Polish-American Steeven Radzikowski, was merely intended to reform Slovio, but gradually it developed into a separate language. Like Slovianski, it was a collaborative project that existed in two variants: a "full" and a simplified version. Дора Солакова, "Съвременни опити за създаване на изкуствен общославянски език", in: Езиков свят – Orbis Linguarum, Issue no.2/2010 (Югозападен Университет "Неофит Рилски", Blagoevgrad, 2010, ISSN 1312-0484), p. 248. In 2009 a new language was published, Neoslavonic ("Novoslovienskij", later "Novoslověnsky") by the Czech Vojtěch Merunka, based on Old Church Slavonic grammar but using part of Slovianski's vocabulary.Vojtěch Merunka, Jazyk novoslovienskij. Prague 2009, ), pp. 15–16, 19–20. Dušan Spáčil, "Je tu nový slovanský Jazyk", in: Květy no. 31, July 2010.
In 2011, Slovianski, Slovioski and Novoslověnsky merged into one common project under the name Interslavic (Medžuslovjanski). Slovianski grammar and dictionary were expanded to include all options of Neoslavonic as well, turning it into a more flexible language based on prototypes rather than fixed rules. From that time, Slovianski and Neoslavonic have no longer been developed as separate projects, even though their names are still frequently in use as synonyms or "dialects" of Interslavic.
In the same year, the various simplified forms of Slovianski and Slovioski that were meant to meet the needs of beginners and non-Slavs were reworked into a highly simplified form of Interslavic, Slovianto. Slovianto is intended to have stages of complexity: level 1 with plurals, tenses, and basic vocabulary; level 2 with grammatical gender and basic verb conjugation; and a to-be-done level 3 with noun declension.
After the 2017 Conference on Interslavic Language (CISLa), the project of unifying the two standards of Interslavic had been commenced by Merunka and van Steenbergen, with a planned new, singular grammar and orthography. An early example of this endeavor is Merunka and van Steenbergen's joint publication on Slavic cultural diplomacy, released to coincide with the conference.
After two failed applications for an ISO 639-3 code for Interslavic from 2012 and 2014, a third request was filed in September 2019 and resulted in the adoption of the ISO 639-3 code '' in April 2024.
Community
The number of people who speak Interslavic is difficult to establish; the lack of demographic data is a common problem among constructed languages, so that estimates are always rough. In 2012, the Bulgarian author G. Iliev mentioned a number of "several hundreds" of Slovianski speakers.G. Iliev, Short History of the Cyrillic Alphabet (Plovdiv, 2012), p. 67. HTML version For comparison, 320,000 people claimed to speak Esperanto in the same year. In 2022, the Russian magazine Mel mentioned a number of 20,000 speakers. This number clearly refers to the size of the Interslavic community as a whole and not necessarily to the number of active participants. As for the latter, Kocór e.a. (2017) estimated the number of active users of Interslavic to be 2,000.Kocór, p. 21.
Interslavic has an active online community, including four Facebook groups with 16,280, 835, 330 and 120 members respectively by 4 April 2022 and an Internet forum with around 490 members.
The project has two online news portals, a peer-reviewed expert journal focusing on issues of Slavic peoples in the wider sociocultural context of current times and a wiki united with a collection of texts and materials in Interslavic language somewhat similar to Wikisource. Since 2016, Interslavic is used in the scientific journal Ethnoentomology for paper titles, abstracts and image captions.Erik Tihelka, Interslavic: a new option for scientific publishing? European Science Editing 44(3), August 2018, p. 62.
In June 2017, the first CISLa (Conference on InterSlavic Language) took place in the Czech town of Staré Město near Uherské Hradiště. The presentations were either held in Interslavic or translated into Interslavic. Two Interslavic conferences have been held since: CISLa 2018, again in Staré Město as well as in Hodonín, and CISLa 2020, held in Uherský Brod. An Interslavic Day was held in Prague on September 21, 2022.
A volunteer group consisting of native speakers of all standard Slavic languages was established by one of the members of the Interslavic Language Committee. Small Slavic languages and dialects like Rusyn or Upper Sorbian are also included. The group task is to improve the quality of the Interslavic language dictionary by intelligibility analysis.
Phonology The phonemes that were chosen for Interslavic were the most popular Slavic phonemes cross-linguistically. Since stress patterns vary greatly between Slavic languages and Interslavic is not an ethnic language, there are no hard and fast rules regarding stress.
Consonants and vowels in brackets are "optional" and link directly to Old Church Slavonic.
+Consonant phonemes Labial Alveolar/Dental Post-alveolar/Palatal Velar plain pal. Nasal ~ Stop (~) (~) Affricate () ~ ()~ Fricative (~) ~ (~) ~ Trill (~) Lateral~~ Approximant
+Vowel phonemesFrontCentralBackClose Near-close ()Mid () Open-mid, jɛ Near-open(jæ) Open ()
Alphabet One of the main principles of Interslavic is that it can be written on any Slavic keyboard. Since the border between Latin and Cyrillic runs through the middle of Slavic territory, Interslavic allows the use of both alphabets. Because of the differences between, for instance, the Polish alphabet and other Slavic Latin alphabets, as well as between Serbian and other Cyrillic alphabets, orthographic variation is tolerated.
The Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are as follows: