Slavic Languages

The Slavic languages are Indo-European languages that are spoken in Central Europe, Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Russia. They descended from Proto-Slavic. The Slavic languages can be classified into three language groups.

The three groups are East, West and South. The East Group includes Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian. The West Group includes Czech, Slovak and Polish and the South Group includes Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Slovenian.

The East Slavic languages are written in the Cyrillic alphabet, but the West Slavic languages are written in the Roman. In the case of the South Slavic languages, the situation is more complex. Slovenian and Croatian are written in the Roman alphabet, but Bulgarian and Macedonian are written in the Cyrillic. Serbian and Bosnian are written in both alphabets, but Serbian is officially written in Cyrillic.

The Slavic languages are known for their extensive series of palatal consonants. Russian and Belarusian have a high central vowel which does not exist in the other Slavic languages. Polish preserves two nasal vowels which the other Slavic languages do not. Unlike the other Slavic languages, Ukrainian does not devoice word-final obstruents.

Stress varies among the Slavic languages. In Russian and Ukrainian, it can occur on any syllable. In Polish, it tends to fall on the penultimate syllable and in Czech and Slovak the stress is on the first syllable of the word.

The Slavic languages share more characteristics than many other language families. The most widely-spoken of the Slavic languages is Russian. The Slavic languages tend to have many consonant clusters and relatively few vowels. They are spoken in a large area which extends from Central Europe and the Balkans to the easternmost part of Russia.