Distribution
| East Slavic | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution | Eurasia (Eastern Europe, Northern Asia, and the Caucasus) |
| Linguistic classification | Indo-European
|
Early forms | |
| Subdivisions | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-5 | zle |
| Glottolog | east1426 |
The East Slavic languages constitute one of three regional subgroups of the Slavic languages, distinct from the West and South Slavic languages. East Slavic languages are currently spoken natively throughout Eastern Europe, and eastwards to Siberia and the Russian Far East. [1] In part due to the large historical influence of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, the Russian language is also spoken as a lingua franca in many regions of Caucasus and Central Asia. Of the three Slavic branches, East Slavic is the most spoken, with the number of native speakers larger than the Western and Southern branches combined.
The common consensus is that Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian are the extant East Slavic languages. [2] Some linguists also consider Rusyn a separate language, [3] [4] although it is sometimes considered a dialect of Ukrainian. [5]
The modern East Slavic languages descend from a common predecessor spoken in Kievan Rus' from the 9th to 13th centuries, which later evolved into Ruthenian, the chancery language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the Dnieper river valley, and into medieval Russian in the Volga river valley, the language of the Russian principalities including the Grand Duchy of Moscow.
All these languages use the Cyrillic script, but with particular modifications. Belarusian and Ukrainian, which are descendants of Ruthenian, have a tradition of using Latin-based alphabets—the Belarusian Lacinka and the Ukrainian Latynka alphabets, respectively (also Rusyn uses Latin in some regions, e.g. in Slovakia). [6]
Modern East Slavic languages include Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian. The Rusyn language is sometimes considered the fourth living language of the group, its status as an independent language being the subject of scientific debate. [7]
The East Slavic territory exhibits a linguistic continuum with many transitional dialects. Between Belarusian and Ukrainian there is the Polesian dialect, which shares features from both languages. East Polesian is a transitional variety between Belarusian and Ukrainian on one hand, and between South Russian and Ukrainian on the other hand. At the same time, Belarusian and Southern Russian form a continuous area, making it virtually impossible to draw a line between the two languages. Central or Middle Russian (with its Moscow sub-dialect), the transitional step between the North and the South, became a base for the Russian literary standard. Northern Russian with its predecessor, the Old Novgorod dialect, has many original and archaic features.
Ruthenian, the ancestor of modern Belarusian and Ukrainian, was the official language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as "Chancery Slavonic" until the end of the 17th century when it was gradually replaced by the Polish language. It was also the native language of the Cossack Hetmanate until the end of the 18th century, when the Ukrainian state completely became part of the Russian Empire in 1764. [8] The Constitution of Pylyp Orlyk from 1710 is one of the most important written sources of the Ruthenian language. Due to the influence of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth over many centuries, Belarusian and Ukrainian have been influenced in several respects by Polish, a Lechitic West Slavic language. As a result of the long Polish-Lithuanian rule, these languages had been less exposed to Church Slavonic, featuring therefore less Church Slavonicisms than the modern Russian language, for example:
| Ukrainian | Belarusian | Russian |
|---|---|---|
| солодкий (solodkyj) | салодкі (salodki) | сладкий (sladkij) |
Additionally, the original East Slavic phonetic form was kept in many words in Ukrainian and Belarusian, for example:
| Ukrainian | Belarusian | Russian |
|---|---|---|
| одиниця (odynycia) | адзінка (adzinka) | eдиница (yedinica) |
In general, Ukrainian and Belarusian are also closer to other Western European languages, especially to German (via Polish). At the same time Russian was being heavily influenced by Church Slavonic (South Slavic language), but also by the Turkic and Uralic languages. [9] For example:
| Ukrainian | Belarusian | Russian |
|---|---|---|
| шукати (šukaty) | шукаць (šukać) | искать (iskat́) |
| Compare Polish "szukać" and Old Low German "sōkian" (German "suchen") | Compare Bulgarian "искам" (iskam) (with a meaning shift: "to want") and Serbo-Croatian "искати" (iskati) | |
What's more, all three languages do also have false friends, that sometimes can lead to (big) misunderstandings. [10] For example, Ukrainian орати (oraty) — "to plow" and Russian орать (orat́) — "to scream", or Ukrainian помітити (pomityty) — "to notice" and Russian пометить (pometit́) — "to mark".
The alphabets of the East Slavic languages are all written in the Cyrillic script, however each of them has their own letters and pronunciations. Russian and Ukrainian have 33 letters, while Belarusian has 32. Additionally, Belarusian and Ukrainian use the apostrophe (') for the hard sign, which has the same function as the letter Ъ in Russian.
| East Slavic languages | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Russian | А | Б | В | Г | Д | Е | Ё | Ж | З | И | Й | К | Л | М | Н | О | П | Р | С | Т | У | Ф | Х | Ц | Ч | Ш | Щ | Ъ | Ы | Ь | Э | Ю | Я | |||||
| Belarusian | А | Б | В | Г | Д | Е | Ё | Ж | З | І | Й | К | Л | М | Н | О | П | Р | С | Т | У | Ў | Ф | Х | Ц | Ч | Ш | ' | Ы | Ь | Э | Ю | Я | |||||
| Ukrainian | А | Б | В | Г | Ґ | Д | Е | Є | Ж | З | И | І | Ї | Й | К | Л | М | Н | О | П | Р | С | Т | У | Ф | Х | Ц | Ч | Ш | Щ | ' | Ь | Ю | Я | ||||
Some letters, that are not included in the alphabet of a language, can be written as digraphs. For example, the sound values of the letter Ё, which doesn't exist in the Ukrainian alphabet, can be written as ЙО (ЬО before and after consonants), while the letter Щ in Russian and Ukrainian corresponds to ШЧ in Belarusian (compare Belarusian плошча and Ukrainian площа ("area")).
There are also different rules of usage for certain letters, e.g. the soft sign (Ь) cannot be written after the letter Ц in Russian, because the consonant /tsʲ/ does not exist in the Russian language, while in Ukrainian and especially Belarusian, on the contrary, it is relatively common (Ukrainian ць etymologically corresponds to Russian and Belarusian ц; Belarusian ць etymologically corresponds to Russian and Ukrainian ть). Moreover, the letter Щ in standard Russian is always pronounced softly (palatalization).
Standard Ukrainian, unlike all the other Slavic languages (excl. Serbo-Croatian), does not exhibit final devoicing. Nevertheless, this rule is not that clear when listening to colloquial Ukrainian. It's one of the typical deviations that occur in the Ukrainian spoken language. [11]
Besides the differences of the alphabets, some letters represent different sounds depending on the language. For example, the letter И (romanized as I for Russian and Y for Ukrainian) in Russian is mostly pronounced as /i/ (identical with the Ukrainian І), while in Ukrainian it's mostly pronounced as /ɪ/ (very similar to the Russian Ы). Other examples:
| Letter | Pronunciation | |
|---|---|---|
| Belarusian and Russian Е | Ukrainian Є | /je/,/ʲe/ |
| Belarusian and Russian Э | Ukrainian Е | /e/ |
| Belarusian and Russian Ы | Ukrainian И | /ɨ/ (B. and R.), /ɪ/ (U.) |
| Belarusian and Ukrainian І | Russian И | /i/,/ʲi/ |
| Belarusian and Ukrainian Г | no sound in Russian | /ɣ/,/ɦ/ |
| Russian Г | Ukrainian Ґ | /ɡ/ |
 |
| Isoglosses | Northern Russian | Standard Russian (Moscow dialect) | Southern Russian | Standard Belarusian | Standard Ukrainian | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| reduction of unstressed /o/ (akanye) | no | yes [n 1] | no [n 2] | R. голова́ /ɡɐlɐˈva/, B. галава́ /ɣalaˈva/, U. голова́ /ɦɔlɔˈʋa/ "head" | ||
| pretonic /ʲe/ (yakanye) | /ʲe/ | /ʲi/ | /ʲa/ | /e/ [n 3] | R. земля́ /zʲiˈmlʲa/, B. зямля́ /zʲaˈmlʲa/, U. земля́ /zeˈmlʲa/ "earth" | |
| Proto-Slavic *i | /i/ | /ɪ/ [n 4] | R. лист /ˈlʲist/, B. ліст /ˈlʲist/, U. лист /ˈlɪst/ "leaf" | |||
| Proto-Slavic *y | /ɨ/ | R./B. ты /ˈtɨ/, U. ти /ˈtɪ/ "thou, you" | ||||
| stressed CoC | /o/ | /i/ [n 5] [n 6] | R. ночь /ˈnot͡ɕ/, B. ноч /ˈnot͡ʂ/, U. ніч /ˈnʲit͡ʃ/ "night" | |||
| Proto-Slavic *ě | /e̝~i̯ɛ~i/ | /e/ | R. се́мя /ˈsʲemʲa/, B. се́мя /ˈsʲemʲa/, U. сі́м'я /ˈsʲimja/ "seed" | |||
| /e/>/o/ change before nonpalatalized consonants [n 7] | always | under stress | after /j/, /nʲ/, /lʲ/, /ʒ/, /ʃ/, /t͡ʃ/ | R. зелёный /zʲiˈlʲonɨj/, B. зялёны /zʲaˈlʲonɨ/, U. зеле́ний /zeˈlenɪj/ "green" | ||
| Proto-Slavic *c | /t͡s/ [n 8] [n 9] | /t͡s,t͡sʲ/ | R. волчица (volčica) B. ваўчыца (vaŭčyca) U. вовчиця (vovčyc’a) ”female wolf” | |||
| Proto-Slavic *č | /t͡ɕ/ [n 10] [n 9] | /t͡ʂ/ | /t͡ʃ/ | R. час /ˈt͡ɕas/ "hour", B. час /ˈt͡ʂas/, U. час /ˈt͡ʃas/ "time" | ||
| Proto-Slavic *skj, zgj | /ɕː/, [n 11] /ʑː/ | /ʂt͡ʂ/, /ʐd͡ʐ/ | /ʃt͡ʃ/, /ʒd͡ʒ/ | R. ещё /jeˈɕːo/ B. яшчэ /jaˈʂt͡ʂe/ U. ще /ʃt͡ʃe/ “yet” | ||
| soft dental stops | /tʲ/, /dʲ/ [n 12] | /t͡sʲ/, /d͡zʲ/ | /tʲ/, /dʲ/ | R. де́сять /ˈdʲesʲitʲ/, B. дзе́сяць /ˈd͡zʲesʲat͡sʲ/, U. де́сять /ˈdesʲatʲ/ "ten" | ||
| Proto-Slavic *v | /v,f/ [n 13] | /w/ | /v/ [v,w] | /ʋ/ [β,w] /u̯/ (at the end of a closed syllable) | R. о́стров /ˈostraf/, B. во́страў /ˈvostrau̯/, U. о́стрів /ˈostriu̯/ "island" | |
| /f/ (in loanwords) | /f/ | /x~xv~xw~xu̯/ | /f/ | |||
| Prothetic /v~w~u̯/ | no [n 14] | yes | R. о́стров /ˈostraf/, B. во́страў /ˈvostrau̯/, U. о́стрів /ˈostriu̯/ "island" | |||
| Proto-Slavic *g | /ɡ/ | /ɣ/ | /ɦ/ | R. голова́ /ɡɐlɐˈva/, B. галава́ /ɣalaˈva/, U. голова́ /ɦɔlɔˈʋa/ "head" | ||
| Hardening of final soft labials | no | yes | R. степь /sʲtʲepʲ/, B. стэп /stɛp/, U. степ /stɛp/ "steppe" | |||
| Hardening of soft /rʲ/ | no | yes | hardened at the end of a closed syllable and not hardened elsewere | R. матерь (máter’) B. Вікторыя (Viktoryja) U. кобзар (kobzár (nominative case) кобзаря (kobzar’á (genetive case) | ||
| Proto-Slavic *CrьC, ClьC, CrъC, CrъC | /rʲe/, /lʲe/, /ro/, /lo/ | /rɨ/, /ro/, /lʲi/, /lɨ/ | /rɪ/, /lɪ/, /ro/, /lo/ | Protoslavic. ‘*kry (singular accusative case. krьvь); R. кровь (krov’), кровавый (krovávyj) B. кроў (kroŭ), крывавы (kryvávy) U. кров (krov), кривавий (kryvávyj) ”blood, bloody” | ||
| Proto-Slavic *-ъj-, -ьj- | /oj/, /ej/ | /ɨj/, /ij/ | /ɪj/ | |||
| Proto-Slavic adj. end. *-ьjь | /ej/ | /ij/, [n 15] /ej/ | /ej/ [n 16] | /ij/ | /ɪj/, /ij/ | |
| Proto-Slavic adj. end. *-ъjь | /oj/ | /ɨj/, [n 15] /oj/ | /oj/ [n 17] | /ɨj/ | /ɪj/ | |
| Loss of the vocative case | no | yes [n 18] | no | |||
| 3 sg. & pl. pres. ind. | /t/ | /tʲ/ | /t͡sʲ/ | /tʲ/ | R. ду́мают /ˈdumajut/, B. ду́маюць/ˈdumajut͡sʲ/, Uk. ду́мають/ˈdumajutʲ/ "(they) think" | |
| Dropping out of 3 sg. pres. ind. ending (in e-stems) | no | yes | R. скажет (skážet) B. скажа (skáža) U. скаже (skáže) ”(he/she) will say” | |||
| 3 sg. masc. past ind. | /v~w~u̯/ [n 19] | /l/ | /u̯/ | R. ду́мал /ˈdumal/, B. ду́маў/ˈdumau̯/, U. ду́мав/ˈdumau̯/ "(he) thought" | ||
| 2nd palatalization in oblique cases | no | yes | R. руке́ /ruˈkʲe/, B. руцэ́ /ruˈt͡se/, U. руці́ /ruˈt͡sʲi/ "hand" (locative or prepositional case) | |||
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 needed ]
Throughout the Middle Ages (and in some way up to the present day) there existed a duality between the Church Slavonic language used as some kind of 'higher' register (not only) in religious texts and the popular tongue used as a 'lower' register for secular texts. It has been suggested to describe this situation as diglossia , although there do exist mixed texts where it is sometimes very hard to determine why a given author used a popular or a Church Slavonic form in a given context. Church Slavonic was a major factor in the evolution of modern Russian, where there still exists a "high stratum" of words that were imported from this language. [13]
Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic is the first Slavic literary language and the oldest extant written Slavonic language attested in literary sources. It belongs to the South Slavic subgroup of the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family and remains the liturgical language of many Christian Orthodox churches. Until the reforms of Patriarch Nikon of Moscow between 1652 and 1666, Church Slavonic was the mandatory language of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Belarusian is an East Slavic language. It is one of the two official languages in Belarus, alongside Russian. Additionally, it is spoken in some parts of Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Ukraine by Belarusian minorities in those countries.
Ukrainian is one of the East Slavic languages in the Indo-European languages family, and it is spoken primarily in Ukraine. It is the first (native) language of a large majority of Ukrainians.
Rusyn is an East Slavic language spoken by Rusyns in parts of Central and Eastern Europe, and written in the Cyrillic script. The majority of speakers live in an area known as Carpathian Ruthenia that spans from Transcarpathia, westward into eastern Slovakia and south-east Poland. There is also a sizeable Pannonian Rusyn linguistic island in Vojvodina, Serbia, as well as a Rusyn diaspora throughout the world. Per the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, Rusyn is officially recognized as a protected minority language by Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Serbia, and Slovakia.
Ruthenian is an exonymic linguonym for a closely related group of East Slavic linguistic varieties, particularly those spoken from the 15th to 18th centuries in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and in East Slavic regions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Regional distribution of those varieties, both in their literary and vernacular forms, corresponded approximately to the territories of the modern states of Belarus and Ukraine. By the end of the 18th century, they gradually diverged into regional variants, which subsequently developed into the modern Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Rusyn languages, all of which are mutually intelligible.
Church Slavonic is the conservative Slavic liturgical language used by the Eastern Orthodox Church in Belarus, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Serbia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Slovenia and Croatia. The language appears also in the services of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese, and occasionally in the services of the Orthodox Church in America.
Yat or jat is the thirty-second letter of the old Cyrillic alphabet. It is usually romanized as E with a haček: Ě ě.
The Cyrillic I is a letter used in almost all modern Cyrillic alphabets with the exception of Belarusian.
Ge, ghe, or he is a letter of the Cyrillic script. Most commonly, it represents the voiced velar plosive, like ⟨g⟩ in "gift", or the voiced glottal fricative, like ⟨h⟩ in "heft". It is generally romanized using the Latin letter g or h, depending on the source language.
A yer is either of two letters in Cyrillic alphabets, ъ and ь. The Glagolitic alphabet used, as respective counterparts, the letters (Ⱏ) and (Ⱐ). They originally represented phonemically the "ultra-short" vowels in Slavic languages, including Old Church Slavonic, and are collectively known as the yers.
Little yus and big yus, or jus, are letters of the Cyrillic script representing two Common Slavonic nasal vowels in the early Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets. Each can occur in iotated form, formed as ligatures with the decimal i (І). Other yus letters are blended yus (Ꙛ ꙛ), closed little yus (Ꙙ ꙙ) and iotated closed little yus (Ꙝ ꙝ),and iotated blended yus.()
The soft sign is a letter in the Cyrillic script that is used in various Slavic languages. In Old Church Slavonic, it represented a short or reduced front vowel. However, over time, the specific vowel sound it denoted was largely eliminated and merged with other vowel sounds.
Yeru or Eru, usually called Y in modern Russian or Yery or Ery historically and in modern Church Slavonic, is a letter in the Cyrillic script. It represents the close central unrounded vowel after non-palatalised (hard) consonants in the Belarusian and Russian alphabets.
The Ukrainian alphabet is the set of letters used to write Ukrainian, which is the official language of Ukraine. It is one of several national variations of the Cyrillic script. It comes from the Cyrillic script, which was devised in the 9th century for the first Slavic literary language, called Old Slavonic. In the 10th century, Cyrillic script became used in Kievan Rus' to write Old East Slavic, from which the Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn, and Ukrainian alphabets later evolved. The modern Ukrainian alphabet has 33 letters in total: 21 consonants, 1 semivowel, 10 vowels and 1 palatalization sign. Sometimes the apostrophe (') is also included, which has a phonetic meaning and is a mandatory sign in writing, but is not considered as a letter and is not included in the alphabet.
The letter Ъ ъ of the Cyrillic script is known as er golyam in the Bulgarian alphabet, as the hard sign in the modern Russian and Rusyn alphabets, as the debelo jer in pre-reform Serbian orthography, and as ayirish belgisi in the Uzbek Cyrillic alphabet. The letter is called back yer or back jer and yor or jor in the pre-reform Russian orthography, in Old East Slavic, and in Old Church Slavonic.
The term North Slavic languages is used in three main senses:
The phonological system of the modern Belarusian language consists of at least 44 phonemes: 5 vowels and 39 consonants. Consonants may also be geminated. There is no absolute agreement on the number of phonemes; rarer or contextually variant sounds are included by some scholars.
Numerous Cyrillic alphabets are based on the Cyrillic script. The early Cyrillic alphabet was developed in the 9th century AD and replaced the earlier Glagolitic script developed by the theologians Cyril and Methodius. It is the basis of alphabets used in various languages, past and present, Slavic origin, and non-Slavic languages influenced by Russian. As of 2011, around 252 million people in Eurasia use it as the official alphabet for their national languages. About half of them are in Russia. Cyrillic is one of the most-used writing systems in the world. The creator is Saint Clement of Ohrid from the Preslav literary school in the First Bulgarian Empire.
Slavic microlanguages are literary linguistic varieties that exist alongside the better-known Slavic languages of historically prominent nations. The term "literary microlanguages" was coined by Aleksandr Dulichenko in late 1970s; it subsequently became a standard term in Slavistics.
Yo, Jo, Io, or Ye with diaeresis is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Unicode, the letter ⟨Ё⟩ is named CYRILLIC CAPITAL/SMALL LETTER IO.
...following Vuk's reform of Cyrillic in the early nineteenth century, Ljudevit Gaj in the 1830s performed the same operation on Latinica, using the Czech system and producing a one-to-one symbol correlation between Cyrillic and Latinica as applied to the Serbian and Croatian parallel systems
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
