The Cyrillic script is a writing system used for various alphabets across Eurasia and is used as the national script in various Slavic-, Turkic- and Persian-speaking countries in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and North Asia. It is based on the Early Cyrillic alphabet developed during the 9th century AD at the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire. It is the basis of alphabets used in various languages, especially those of Orthodox Slavic origin, and non-Slavic languages influenced by Russian. As of 2011, around 250 million people in Eurasia use it as the official alphabet for their national languages, with Russia accounting for about half of them. With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official script of the European Union, following Latin and Greek.
The Slavic languages are the Indo-European languages spoken by the Slavic peoples. 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 languages in a Balto-Slavic group within the Indo-European family.
Slavs are an Indo-European ethno-linguistic group who speak the various Slavic languages of the larger Balto-Slavic linguistic group. They are native to Eurasia, stretching from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe all the way north and eastwards to Northeast Europe, Northern Asia (Siberia), and Central Asia, as well as historically in Western Europe and Western Asia. From the early 6th century they spread to inhabit the majority of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Today, there is a large Slavic diaspora throughout North America, particularly in the United States and Canada as a result of immigration.
Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic, also known as Old Church Slavic or Old Slavic, was the first Slavic literary language. It is also referred to as Paleo-Slavic (Paleoslavic) or Palaeo-Slavic (Palaeoslavic), not to be confused with the Proto-Slavic. It is often abbreviated to OCS.
In the Slavic religious tradition, Domovoy is the household god of a given kin. They are deified progenitors, that is to say the fountainhead ancestors of the kin. According to the Russian folklorist E. G. Kagarov, the Domovoy is a personification of the supreme Rod in the microcosm of kinship. Sometimes he has a female counterpart, Domania, the goddess of the household, though he is most often a single god. The Domovoy expresses himself as a number of other spirits of the household in its different functions.
Eastern Slavic naming customs are the traditional way of identifying a person's given name and patronymic name in countries influenced by rule of the Russian Empire and more significantly the Soviet Union which enacted widespread Russification in culture, lingua franca, alphabet and customs.
Ban was a noble title used in several states in Central and Southeastern Europe between the 7th century and the 20th century, primarily in medieval Croatia and Hungary and their respective predecessor states. In English, a common term for the province governed by the ban is banate and term for the office of the ban is banship.
The Balto-Slavic languages are a branch of the Indo-European family of languages. It traditionally comprises the Baltic and Slavic languages. Baltic and Slavic languages share several linguistic traits not found in any other Indo-European branch, which points to a period of common development. It is now a general consensus among linguists to classify Baltic and Slavic languages into a single branch, even though some details of the nature of their relationship remain in dispute in some circles, usually due to political controversies. Some linguists however, have suggested that Balto-Slavic should be split into three equidistant groups: Eastern Baltic, Western Baltic and Slavic.
A gord is a medieval Slavic fortified wooden settlement, sometimes known as a burgwall after the German term for such sites. Gords were built during the late Bronze and early Iron Ages by the Lusatian culture, and later in the 8th–7th centuries CE, in what is now Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, eastern Germany, Romania/Moldova, Belarus and western Ukraine. These settlements were usually founded on strategic sites such as hills, riverbanks, lake islands, or peninsulas.
Vladimir is a male Slavic given name of Old Slavic origin, now widespread throughout all Slavic nations.
A modern Belarusian name of a person consists of three parts: given name, patronymic, and family name, according to the Eastern Slavic naming customs, similar to Russian names and Ukrainian names.
The first known record of the name of Lithuania is in a 9 March 1009 story of Saint Bruno recorded in the Quedlinburg Chronicle. The Chronicle recorded a Latinized form of the Russian word for Lithuania - Литва (Litva). Although it is clear the name originated from a Baltic language, scholars still debate the meaning of the word.
Croatian names follow complex and unique lettering, structuring, composition, and naming customs that have considerable similarities with most other European name systems, and with those of other Slavic peoples in particular.
The early Slavs were a diverse group of tribal societies who lived during the Migration Period and Early Middle Ages in Eastern Europe and established the foundations for the Slavic nations through the Slavic states of the High Middle Ages. The first written use of the name "Slavs" dates to the 6th century, when the Slavic tribes inhabited a large portion of Central and Eastern Europe. By that century, nomadic Iranian ethnic groups living on the Eurasian Steppe had been absorbed by the region's Slavic population. Over the next two centuries, the Slavs expanded southwest toward the Balkans and the Alps and northeast towards the Volga River. It's still a matter of controversy where the original habitat of the Slavs was, but scholars believe it was somewhere in Eastern Europe. In the past not much attention was paid to the origin of the Slavic people.
Ukrainian names are given names that originated in Ukraine. In addition to the first (given) names, Ukrainians also have patronymic and family names.
In Slavic mythology, Perun is the highest god of the pantheon and the god of sky, thunder, lightning, storms, rain, law, war, fertility and oak trees. His other attributes were fire, mountains, wind, iris, eagle, firmament, horses and carts, weapons, and war. He was first associated with weapons made of stone and later with those of metal.
Proto-Slavic is the unattested, reconstructed proto-language of all the Slavic languages. It represents Slavic speech approximately from the 5th to 9th centuries AD. As with most other proto-languages, no attested writings have been found; scholars have reconstructed the language by applying the comparative method to all the attested Slavic languages and by taking into account other Indo-European languages.
