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84-509: The South Slavic languages are one of three branches of the Slavic languages . There are approximately 30 million speakers, mainly in the Balkans . These are separated geographically from speakers of the other two Slavic branches ( West and East ) by a belt of German , Hungarian and Romanian speakers. The first South Slavic language to be written (also the first attested Slavic language)

168-558: A dialectal continuum stretching from today's southern Austria to southeast Bulgaria . On the level of dialectology , they are divided into Western South Slavic (Slovene and Serbo-Croatian dialects) and Eastern South Slavic (Bulgarian and Macedonian dialects); these represent separate migrations into the Balkans and were once separated by intervening Hungarian, Romanian, and Albanian populations; as these populations were assimilated, Eastern and Western South Slavic fused with Torlakian as

252-564: A 'nationalisation' of the language. The language in Bosnia started developing independently after Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence in 1992. The independent development of the language in Montenegro became a topic among some Montenegrin academics in the 1990s. Serbian, Montenegrin and Bosnian standards varieties tend to be inclusive, i.e. to accept a wider range of idioms and to use loanwords (German, Italian and Turkish), whereas

336-601: A distinct feature of Bosnian speech and language tradition, particularly under influence of Turkish and Arabic, and even introduced in some places where it etymologically did not exist. Those forms were in the mid 1990s also accepted in the orthography of the Bosnian language. However, 2018, in the new issue of the Orthography of the Bosnian language , words without the phoneme /x/ (written as "h") are accepted due to their prevalence in language practice. Because

420-699: A part of interdisciplinary study of Slavic ethnogenesis, a lexicostatistical classification of Slavic languages. It was built using qualitative 110-word Swadesh lists that were compiled according to the standards of the Global Lexicostatistical Database project and processed using modern phylogenetic algorithms. The resulting dated tree complies with the traditional expert views on the Slavic group structure. Kassian-Dybo's tree suggests that Proto-Slavic first diverged into three branches: Eastern, Western and Southern. The Proto-Slavic break-up

504-521: A partial exception of Bulgarian and Macedonian , they have fully developed inflection -based conjugation and declension . In their relational synthesis Slavic languages distinguish between lexical and inflectional suffixes . In all cases, the lexical suffix precedes the inflectional in an agglutination mode. The fusional categorization of Slavic languages is based on grammatic inflectional suffixes alone. Prefixes are also used, particularly for lexical modification of verbs. For example,

588-598: A period in which all South Slavic dialects exhibited an exclusive set of extensive phonological, morphological or lexical changes (isoglosses) peculiar to them. Furthermore, Matasović argues, there was never a period of cultural or political unity in which Proto-South-Slavic could have existed during which Common South Slavic innovations could have occurred. Several South-Slavic-only lexical and morphological patterns which have been proposed have been postulated to represent common Slavic archaisms , or are shared with some Slovakian or Ukrainian dialects. The South Slavic dialects form

672-553: A recent past. Pontic Steppe Caucasus East Asia Eastern Europe Northern Europe Pontic Steppe Northern/Eastern Steppe Europe South Asia Steppe Europe Caucasus India Indo-Aryans Iranians East Asia Europe East Asia Europe Indo-Aryan Iranian Indo-Aryan Iranian Others European Slavic languages descend from Proto-Slavic , their immediate parent language , ultimately deriving from Proto-Indo-European ,

756-463: A separate phoneme – "jat diphthong" – or even two phonemes, one short and one long. There are even several proposals by Croatian linguists for an orthography reform concerning these two diphthongs, but they have not been seriously considered for implementation. The standardisation of Montenegrin in 2009 has introduced two new letters, ⟨Ś⟩ and ⟨Ź⟩ , for the sounds [ɕ] and [ʑ] respectively. These are optional spellings of

840-546: A somewhat unusual feature of virtually free word order in a sentence clause , although subject–verb–object and adjective-before-noun is the preferred order in the neutral style of speech . Modern Bulgarian differs from other Slavic languages, because it almost completely lost declension , it developed definite articles from demonstrative pronouns (similar to "the" from "this" in English ), and it formed indicative and renarrative tenses for verbs . Since

924-456: A strong Serb presence. In addition, a distinct characteristics of some vernaculars is stress shift to pro clitics , e.g. phrase u Bosni ( in Bosnia ) will be pronounced /ǔ bosni/ instead of /u bôsni/ as in northern parts of Serbia. The northern vernaculars in Serbia also preserve the four-accent system, but the unstressed lengths have been shortened or disappeared in some positions. However,

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1008-595: A television programme is usually in Cyrillic, but advertisements are usually in Latin. The division is partly based on religion – Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Macedonia (which use Cyrillic) are Orthodox countries, whereas Croatia and Slovenia (which use Latin) are Catholic . The Bosnian language , used by the Muslim Bosniaks , also uses Latin, but in the past used Bosnian Cyrillic . The Glagolitic alphabet

1092-491: A transitional dialect. On the other hand, the breakup of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires , followed by formation of nation-states in the 19th and 20th centuries, led to the development and codification of standard languages . Standard Slovene, Bulgarian, and Macedonian are based on distinct dialects. The Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian standard variants of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian are based on

1176-630: Is i or sometimes e (rarely as (i)je ), or mixed ( Ekavian–Ikavian ). Many dialects of Chakavian preserved significant number of Dalmatian words, but also have many loanwords from Venetian , Italian , Greek and other Mediterranean languages. Example: Ča je, je, tako je vavik bilo, ča će bit, će bit, a nekako će već bit! This dialect is spoken primarily in the federal state of Burgenland in Austria and nearby areas in Vienna, Slovakia , and Hungary by descendants of Croats who migrated there during

1260-590: Is better for geographically adjacent languages and in the written (rather than oral) form. At the same time, recent studies of mutual intelligibility between Slavic languages revealed, that their traditional three-branch division does not withstand quantitative scrutiny. While the grouping of Czech , Slovak and Polish into West Slavic turned out to be appropriate, Western South Slavic Serbo-Croatian and Slovene were found to be closer to Czech and Slovak (West Slavic languages) than to Eastern South Slavic Bulgarian . The traditional tripartite division of

1344-595: Is considered to be a feature of the Zagreb dialect, which has strong Kajkavian influence, rather than standard Croatian. Regardless of vernacular differences, all three standard varieties exclusively promote the Neo-Shtokavian four-accentual system. Both dialects that are considered to be the basis of standard Serbian (Eastern Herzegovinian and Šumadija-Vojvodina dialects) have four accents. kočić There are three principal "pronunciations" ( izgovori /изговори) of

1428-593: Is considered transitional between the Western and Eastern groups of South Slavic languages. Torlakian is thought to fit together with Bulgarian and Macedonian into the Balkan sprachbund , an area of linguistic convergence caused by long-term contact rather than genetic relation. Because of this some researchers tend to classify it as Southeast Slavic . Each of these primary and secondary dialectal units breaks down into subdialects and accentological isoglosses by region. In

1512-451: Is dated to around 100 A.D., which correlates with the archaeological assessment of Slavic population in the early 1st millennium A.D. being spread on a large territory and already not being monolithic. Then, in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., these three Slavic branches almost simultaneously divided into sub-branches, which corresponds to the fast spread of the Slavs through Eastern Europe and

1596-480: Is imposed as a criterion of ethnonational affiliation and a means of affirming political loyalty". Despite the 'nationalisation' of the language in the four countries, "lexical differences between the ethnic variants are extremely limited, even when compared with those between closely related Slavic languages (such as standard Czech and Slovak, Bulgarian and Macedonian), and grammatical differences are even less pronounced. More importantly, complete understanding between

1680-594: Is largely an expression of prescriptivism . In everyday speech in Croatia, da li is used, in fact, extensively, but avoided in written language. In formal Croatian, verb trebati ( need or should ) is transitive , as in English. In Serbian, Montenegrin and Bosnian, it is impersonal , like the French il faut , or the English construct is necessary (to) ; the grammatical subject is either omitted ( it ), or presents

1764-513: Is often used). This is applicable only to the nominative and the accusative – in all other cases, the standards have the same forms: čega , čemu etc. for što . In Croatian, the pronoun who has the form tko , whereas in Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin it has ko , but again, in colloquial speech, the initial "t" is usually omitted. The declension is the same: kome , koga , etc. In addition, Croatian uses komu as an alternative form in

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1848-522: Is preferred in orthography, the latter is more common in colloquial language). Here is an example of a yat reflection that is the same in everything but the syntax: The sentence "I want to do that" could be translated with any of This difference partly extends to the future tense, which in Serbo-Croatian is formed in a similar manner to English, using (elided) present of verb "ht(j)eti" → "hoću"/"hoćeš"/… > "ću"/"ćeš"/… as auxiliary verb. Here,

1932-532: Is regarded as Germanism in Serbian linguistic circles, and it can occasionally lead to awkward sentences. In interrogative and relative constructs, standard Croatian prescribes using the interrogative participle li after the verb, whereas standard Serbian also allows forms with da li . (A similar situation exists in French, where a question can be formed either by inversion or using est-ce que , and can be stretched in English with modal verbs): In addition, non-standard je li ("Is it?"), usually elided to je l' ,

2016-580: 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. The current geographical distribution of natively spoken Slavic languages includes the Balkans , Central and Eastern Europe , and all the way from Western Siberia to the Russian Far East . Furthermore,

2100-429: Is vernacular for forming all kinds of questions, e.g. Je l' možeš? . In standard language, it is used only in questions involving auxiliary verb je (="is"): In summary, the English sentence "I want to know whether I'll start working" would typically read: although many in-between combinations could be met in vernacular speech, depending on speaker's dialect, idiolect, or even mood. The Croatian avoidance of da li

2184-444: Is within the boundaries of modern Ukraine and Southern Federal District of Russia. The Proto-Slavic language existed until around AD 500. By the 7th century, it had broken apart into large dialectal zones. There are no reliable hypotheses about the nature of the subsequent breakups of West and South Slavic. East Slavic is generally thought to converge to one Old East Slavic language of Kievan Rus , which existed until at least

2268-584: The Balto-Slavic group , which belongs to the Indo-European language family. The South Slavic languages have been considered a genetic node in Slavic studies : defined by a set of phonological, morphological and lexical innovations (isoglosses) which separate it from the Western and Eastern Slavic groups. That view, however, has been challenged in recent decades (see below). Some innovations encompassing all South Slavic languages are shared with

2352-588: The Bessarabian Bulgarians in Ukraine ), share a number of characteristics that set them apart from other Slavic languages : Bulgarian and Macedonian share some of their unusual characteristics with other languages in the Balkans, notably Greek and Albanian (see Balkan sprachbund ). Torlakian dialects are spoken in southeastern Serbia , northern North Macedonia , western Bulgaria , southeastern Kosovo , and pockets of western Romania ; it

2436-672: The Declaration on the Common Language , faced with "the negative social, cultural and economic consequences of political manipulations of language in the current language policies of the four countries", which "include using language as an argument justifying the segregation of schoolchildren in some multiethnic environments, unnecessary 'translation' in administration or the media, inventing differences where they do not exist, bureaucratic coercion, as well as censorship (and necessarily also self-censorship), where linguistic expression

2520-599: The Latin script , and have had more Western European influence due to their proximity and speakers being historically Roman Catholic , whereas the East Slavic and Eastern South Slavic languages are written in Cyrillic and, with Eastern Orthodox or Uniate faith, have had more Greek influence. Two Slavic languages, Belarusian and Serbo-Croatian , are biscriptal, i.e. written in either alphabet either nowadays or in

2604-597: The Rusyn language spoken in Transcarpatian Ukraine and adjacent counties of Slovakia and Ukraine. Similarly, the Croatian Kajkavian dialect is more similar to Slovene than to the standard Croatian language. Modern Russian differs from other Slavic languages in an unusually high percentage of words of non-Slavic origin, particularly of Dutch (e.g. for naval terms introduced during

South Slavic languages - Misplaced Pages Continue

2688-653: The Shtokavian dialect that differ in their reflexes of the Proto-Slavic vowel jat . Illustrated by the Common Slavic word for "child", d ě tę , they are: The Serbian language recognises Ekavian and Ijekavian as equally valid pronunciations, whereas Croatian, Montenegrin and Bosnian accept only the Ijekavian pronunciation. In Bosnia and Herzegovina (regardless of the official language) and in Montenegro,

2772-425: The Shtokavian dialects that represent the foundation of the four standard varieties have four pitch accents on stressed syllables: falling tone on a short vowel, written e.g. ⟨ı̏⟩ in dictionaries; rising tone on a short vowel, written e.g. ⟨ì⟩ ; falling tone on a long vowel, written e.g. ⟨î⟩ ; and rising tone on a long vowel, written e.g. ⟨í⟩ . In addition,

2856-557: The dative case . The locative pronoun kamo is only used in Croatian: With modal verbs such as ht(j)eti (want) or moći (can), the infinitive is prescribed in Croatian, whereas the construction da (that/to) + present tense is preferred in Serbian and Montenegrin. This subjunctive of sorts is possibly an influence of the Balkan sprachbund . Again, both alternatives are present and allowed in Bosnian (the first one

2940-730: The national languages of the countries in which they are predominantly spoken: Russian , Belarusian and Ukrainian (of the East group), Polish , Czech and Slovak (of the West group), Bulgarian and Macedonian (eastern members of the South group), and Serbo-Croatian and Slovene (western members of the South group). In addition, Aleksandr Dulichenko recognizes a number of Slavic microlanguages : both isolated ethnolects and peripheral dialects of more well-established Slavic languages. All Slavic languages have fusional morphology and, with

3024-418: The object of needing; the person that needs something is an indirect grammatical object, in the dative case . The latter usage is, however, also encountered in Croatian, especially in spoken form. ): The greatest differences between the standards is in vocabulary . However, most words are well understood, and even occasionally used, in the other standards. In most cases, common usage favours one variant and

3108-493: The same dialect ( Shtokavian ). Thus, in most cases national and ethnic borders do not coincide with dialectal boundaries. Note : Due to the differing political status of languages/dialects and different historical contexts, the classifications are arbitrary to some degree. The dialects that form the eastern group of South Slavic, spoken mostly in Bulgaria and Macedonia and adjacent areas in neighbouring countries (such as

3192-587: The 12th century. Linguistic differentiation was accelerated by the dispersion of the Slavic peoples over a large territory, which in Central Europe exceeded the current extent of Slavic-speaking majorities. Written documents of the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries already display some local linguistic features. For example, the Freising manuscripts show a language that contains some phonetic and lexical elements peculiar to Slovene dialects (e.g. rhotacism ,

3276-521: The 14th or 15th century, major language differences were not between the regions occupied by modern Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, but rather between the north-west (around modern Velikiy Novgorod and Pskov) and the center (around modern Kyiv , Suzdal , Rostov , Moscow as well as Belarus) of the East Slavic territories. The Old Novgorodian dialect of that time differed from the central East Slavic dialects as well as from all other Slavic languages much more than in later centuries. According to Zaliznyak,

3360-458: The 16th century. This dialect (or family of dialects) differs from standard Croatian, since it has been heavily influenced by German and Hungarian. It has properties of all three major dialectal groups in Croatia, since the migrants did not all come from the same area, but the linguistic standard is based on the Chakavian dialect. Kajkavian is mostly spoken in northern and northwest Croatia near

3444-472: The Balkans during the second half of the 1st millennium A.D. (the so-called Slavicization of Europe). The Slovenian language was excluded from the analysis, as both Ljubljana koine and Literary Slovenian show mixed lexical features of Southern and Western Slavic languages (which could possibly indicate the Western Slavic origin of Slovenian, which for a long time was being influenced on the part of

South Slavic languages - Misplaced Pages Continue

3528-416: The Croatian language policy is more purist and prefers neologisms to loan-words, as well as the re-use of neglected older words. Yet there is criticism of the puristic language policy even in Croatia, as exemplified by linguist Snježana Kordić . In 2017, numerous prominent writers, scientists, journalists, activists and other public figures from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia signed

3612-423: The Croatian standard usually transliterates. Bosnian and Montenegrin accept both models, but transliteration is often preferred. Also, when the subject of the future tense is omitted, producing a reversal of the infinitive and auxiliary "ću", only the final "i" of the infinitive is orthographically elided in Croatian and Bosnian, whereas in Serbian and Montenegrin the two have merged into a single word: In general,

3696-472: The Croatian variant; this is a general practice for Serbian–Croatian ambiguities. The phoneme /x/ (written as h ) has been volatile in eastern South Slavic dialects. In Serbian, Montenegrin and some Croatian dialects (including some of those in Slavonia), it has been replaced with /j/, /v/, or elided, and subsequent standardisation sanctioned those forms: However, /x/ and /f/ have been kept in many words as

3780-550: The Eastern Slavic group, but not the Western Slavic. These include: This is illustrated in the following table: Several isoglosses have been identified which are thought to represent exclusive common innovations in the South Slavic language group. They are prevalently phonological in character, whereas morphological and syntactical isoglosses are much fewer in number. Sussex & Cubberly (2006 :43–44) list

3864-526: The Hungarian and Slovene borders—chiefly around the towns of Zagreb , Varaždin, Čakovec, Koprivnica, Petrinja, Delnice and so on. Its reflex of yat is primarily /e/ , rarely diphthongal ije ). This differs from that of the Ekavian accent; many Kajkavian dialects distinguish a closed e —nearly ae (from yat )—and an open e (from the original e ). It lacks several palatals (ć, lj, nj, dž) found in

3948-1139: The Ijekavian pronunciation is common to all official standards, it will be used for examples on this page. Other than this, examples of different morphology are: Also many internationalisms and transliterations are different: (cf. German organisieren , konstruieren , analysieren ) Historically, modern-age internationalisms entered Bosnian and Croatian mostly through German and Italian, Montenegrin mostly through Italian, whereas they entered Serbian through French and Russian, so different localisation patterns were established based on those languages. Also, Greek borrowings came to Serbian directly, but through Latin into Croatian: Most of terms for chemical elements are different: for international names, Bosnian and Croatian use -ij where Serbian and Montenegrin have -ijum ( uranij – uranijum ). In some native names, Croatian has -ik where Serbian and Montenegrin have -(o)nik ( kisik – kiseonik "oxygen", vodik – vodonik "hydrogen"), and Bosnian accepts all variants. Yet others are totally different ( dušik – azot 'nitrogen', kositar – kalaj 'tin'). Some element names are

4032-485: The Ijekavian pronunciation is used almost exclusively. Ikavian pronunciation is nonstandard, and is limited to dialectal use in Dalmatia, Lika, Istria, central Bosnia (area between Vrbas and Bosna ), Western Herzegovina, Bosanska Krajina , Slavonia and northern Bačka ( Vojvodina ). So, for example: A few Croatian linguists have tried to explain the following differences in morphological structure for some words, with

4116-634: The Russian language developed as a convergence of that dialect and the central ones, whereas Ukrainian and Belarusian were continuation of development of the central dialects of East Slavs. Also Russian linguist Sergey Nikolaev, analysing historical development of Slavic dialects' accent system, concluded that a number of other tribes in Kievan Rus came from different Slavic branches and spoke distant Slavic dialects. Differences between Serbo-Croatian standard varieties In socialist Yugoslavia ,

4200-790: The Serbian and Montenegrin standards allow for some doublets such as snaja – snaha and hajde – ajde . However, in other words, especially those of foreign origin, ⟨h⟩ is mandatory. In some regions of Croatia and Bosnia, the sounds for letters ⟨č⟩ (realised as [tʂ] in most other dialects) and ⟨ć⟩ [tɕ] merged or nearly merged, usually into [tʃ] . The same happened with their voiced counterparts, i.e. ⟨dž⟩ ( [dʐ] ) and ⟨đ⟩ ( [dʑ] ) merged into [dʒ] . As result, speakers of those dialects often have difficulties distinguishing these sounds. The Serbian variety usually phonetically transcribes foreign names and words (although both transcription and transliteration are allowed), whereas

4284-594: The Shtokavian dialect, and has some loanwords from the nearby Slovene dialects and German (chiefly in towns). Example: Kak je, tak je; tak je navek bilo, kak bu tak bu, a bu vre nekak kak bu! Slovene is mainly spoken in Slovenia . Spoken Slovene has numerous dialects, but there is no consensus on how many; estimates range from 7 to 50. The lowest estimate refers to the language's seven commonly recognized dialect groups, without subdividing any of them. Some of

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4368-536: The Slavic languages does not take into account the spoken dialects of each language. Within the individual Slavic languages, dialects may vary to a lesser degree, as those of Russian, or to a much greater degree, like those of Slovene. In certain cases so-called transitional dialects and hybrid dialects often bridge the gaps between different languages, showing similarities that do not stand out when comparing Slavic literary (i.e. standard) languages. For example, Slovak (West Slavic) and Ukrainian (East Slavic) are bridged by

4452-642: The Western dialects in the following ways: Apart from these three main areas there are several smaller, significant differences: Languages to the west of Serbia use the Latin script , whereas those to the east and south use Cyrillic . Serbian officially uses the Cyrillic script, though commonly Latin and Cyrillic are used equally. Most newspapers are written in Cyrillic and most magazines are in Latin; books written by Serbian authors are written in Cyrillic, whereas books translated from foreign authors are usually in Latin, other than languages that already use Cyrillic, most notably Russian. On television, writing as part of

4536-594: The ancestor language of all Indo-European languages , via a Proto-Balto-Slavic stage. During the Proto-Balto-Slavic period a number of exclusive isoglosses in phonology, morphology, lexis, and syntax developed, which makes Slavic and Baltic the closest related of all the Indo-European branches. The secession of the Balto-Slavic dialect ancestral to Proto-Slavic is estimated on archaeological and glottochronological criteria to have occurred sometime in

4620-612: The breakup of the Federation, in search of additional indicators of independent and separate national identities, language became a political instrument in virtually all of the new republics. With a boom of neologisms in Croatia, an additional emphasis on Turkisms in the Muslim parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a privileged position of the Cyrillic script in Serb-inhabited parts of the new states, every state and entity showed

4704-676: The diasporas of many Slavic peoples have established isolated minorities of speakers of their languages all over the world. The number of speakers of all Slavic languages together was estimated to be 315 million at the turn of the twenty-first century. It is the largest and most diverse ethno-linguistic group in Europe. The Slavic languages are conventionally (that is, also on the basis of extralinguistic features, such as geography) divided into three subgroups: East , South , and West , which together constitute more than 20 languages. Of these, 10 have at least one million speakers and official status as

4788-505: The digraphs ⟨sj⟩ and ⟨zj⟩ . Critics argue that [ɕ] and [ʑ] are merely allophones of /sj/ and /zj/ in Herzegovinian dialects such as Montenegrin, and therefore the new letters are not required for an adequate orthography. Most dialects of Serbia and Montenegro originally lack the phoneme /x/ , instead having /j/ , /v/ , or nothing (silence). /x/ was introduced with language unification, and

4872-486: The equivalent of English "came out" in Russian is "vyshel", where the prefix "vy-" means "out" , the reduced root "-sh" means "come", and the suffix "-el" denotes past tense of masculine gender . The equivalent phrase for a feminine subject is "vyshla". The gender conjugation of verbs , as in the preceding example, is another feature of some Slavic languages rarely found in other language groups. The well-developed fusional grammar allows Slavic languages to have

4956-450: The ethnic (and dialectal) picture of some areas—especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also in central Croatia and Serbia (Vojvodina in particular). In some areas, it is unclear whether location or ethnicity is the dominant factor in the dialect of the speaker. Because of this the speech patterns of some communities and regions are in a state of flux, and it is difficult to determine which dialects will die out entirely. Further research over

5040-434: The ethnic variants of the standard language makes translation and second language teaching impossible", which all means that it is still a pluricentric language. "An examination of all the major 'levels' of language show that BCS is clearly a single language with a single grammatical system." Though all of the language variants could theoretically use either, the scripts differ: Three out of four standard variants have

5124-484: The following phonological isoglosses: Most of these are not exclusive in character, however, and are shared with some languages of the Eastern and Western Slavic language groups (in particular, Central Slovakian dialects). On that basis, Matasović (2008) argues that South Slavic exists strictly as a geographical grouping, not forming a true genetic clade ; in other words, there was never a proto-South Slavic language or

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5208-571: The following sub-branches: Some linguists speculate that a North Slavic branch has existed as well. The Old Novgorod dialect may have reflected some idiosyncrasies of this group. Although the Slavic languages diverged from a common proto-language later than any other groups of the Indo-European language family , enough differences exist between the any two geographically distant Slavic languages to make spoken communication between such speakers cumbersome. As usually found within other language groups , mutual intelligibility between Slavic languages

5292-410: The following unstressed vowel may be either short, ⟨i⟩ , or long, ⟨ī⟩ . In declension and verb conjugation , accent shifts, both by type and position, are very frequent. The distinction between four accents and preservation of post accent lengths is common in vernaculars of western Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in parts of Serbia, as well as in parts of Croatia with

5376-564: The geographical separation between these two groups, also severing the connection between Slavs in Moravia and Lower Austria ( Moravians ) and those in present-day Styria , Carinthia , East Tyrol in Austria , and in the provinces of modern Slovenia , where the ancestors of the Slovenes settled during first colonization. In September 2015, Alexei Kassian and Anna Dybo published, as

5460-471: The infinitive is formally required in both variants: However, when da +present is used instead, it can additionally express the subject's will or intention to perform the action: This form is more frequently used in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia. The nuances in meaning between the three constructs can be slight or even lost (especially in Serbian dialects), in similar manner as the shall/will distinction varies across English dialects. Overuse of da +present

5544-425: The interwar period, scholars have conventionally divided Slavic languages, on the basis of geographical and genealogical principle, and with the use of the extralinguistic feature of script, into three main branches, that is, East, South, and West (from the vantage of linguistic features alone, there are only two branches of the Slavic languages, namely North and South). These three conventional branches feature some of

5628-423: The introduction of a new vowel, "jat diphthong". This is not the opinion of most linguists. Sometimes this leads to confusion: Serbian and Montenegrin pot i cati (to stem from) is in Croatian and Bosnian "to encourage". Croatian and Bosnian "to stem from" is pot je cati, whereas Serbian and Montenegrin for "encourage" is po dsti cati. Standard Bosnian allows both variants, and ambiguities are resolved by preferring

5712-614: The language exclusively as 'the Croatian literary language', or sometimes 'the Croatian or Serbian language', as was common before Yugoslavia. Bolstered with the 1967 Declaration on the Name and Status of the Croatian Literary Language , these two names were subsequently prescribed in the Croatian constitution of 1974 . The language was regarded as one common language with different variants and dialects. The unity of

5796-441: The language was approached as a pluricentric language with two regional normative varieties—Eastern (used in Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina by all ethnicities, either with the Ekavian or the Ijekavian accent) and Western (used in Croatia by all ethnicities, the Ijekavian accent only). However, due to discontent in Croatian intellectual circles, beginning in the late 1960s Croatian cultural workers started to refer to

5880-513: The language was emphasised, making the differences not an indicator of linguistic divisions, but rather factors enriching the 'common language' diversity. West European scientists judge the Yugoslav language policy as an exemplary one: Although three-quarters of the population spoke one language, no single language was official on a federal level. Official languages were declared only at the level of constituent republics and provinces, With

5964-443: The last three decades, however, make this view very hard to maintain nowadays, especially when one considers that there was most likely no " Proto-Baltic " language and that West Baltic and East Baltic differ from each other as much as each of them does from Proto-Slavic. The Proto-Slavic language originated in the area of modern Ukraine and Belarus mostly overlapping with the northern part of Indoeuropean Urheimat , which

6048-476: The neighboring Serbo-Croatian dialects), and the quality Swadesh lists were not yet collected for Slovenian dialects. Because of scarcity or unreliability of data, the study also did not cover the so-called Old Novgordian dialect, the Polabian language and some other Slavic lects. The above Kassian-Dybo's research did not take into account the findings by Russian linguist Andrey Zaliznyak who stated that, until

6132-613: The next few decades will be necessary to determine the changes made in the dialectical distribution of this language group. The eastern Herzegovinian dialect is the basis of the Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian standard variants of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian. Chakavian is spoken in the western, central, and southern parts of Croatia—mainly in Istria , the Kvarner Gulf, Dalmatia and inland Croatia (Gacka and Pokupje, for example). The Chakavian reflex of proto-Slavic yat

6216-563: The past (and currently, in isolated areas), it was not uncommon for individual villages to have their own words and phrases. However, during the 20th century the local dialects have been influenced by Štokavian standards through mass media and public education and much "local speech" has been lost (primarily in areas with larger populations). With the breakup of Yugoslavia , a rise in national awareness has caused individuals to modify their speech according to newly established standard-language guidelines. The wars have caused large migrations, changing

6300-493: The period 1500–1000 BCE. A minority of Baltists maintain the view that the Slavic group of languages differs so radically from the neighboring Baltic group ( Lithuanian , Latvian , and the now-extinct Old Prussian ), that they could not have shared a parent language after the breakup of the Proto-Indo-European continuum about five millennia ago. Substantial advances in Balto-Slavic accentology that occurred in

6384-407: The reign of Peter I ), French (for household and culinary terms during the reign of Catherine II ) and German (for medical, scientific and military terminology in the mid-1800's). Another difference between the East, South, and West Slavic branches is in the orthography of the standard languages: West Slavic languages (and Western South Slavic languages – Croatian and Slovene ) are written in

6468-537: The same set of 30 regular phonemes , so the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian Latin and Serbian Cyrillic alphabets map one to one with one another and with the phoneme inventory, while Montenegrin alphabet has 32 regular phonemes, the additional two being ⟨Ś⟩ and ⟨Ź⟩ . Some linguists analyse the yat reflexes ⟨je⟩ and ⟨ije⟩ , commonly realised as [ie] in Croatian and Bosnian dialects, as

6552-483: The same: srebro (silver), zlato (gold), bakar (copper). Some other imported words differ by grammatical gender , feminine words having an -a suffix and masculine words having a zero-suffix: In Serbian, Montenegrin and Bosnian, the pronoun what is što when used as a relative , but šta when used as an interrogative ; the latter applies also to relative sentences with interrogative meaning. Croatian uses što in all contexts (but in colloquial speech, "šta"

6636-485: The seven groups are more heterogeneous than others, and the higher estimates reflect the varying criteria that have been used to differentiate dialects and subdialects. Slovenian dialects can be so different from each other that a speaker of one dialect may have a very difficult time understanding a speaker of another, particularly if their dialects belong to different groups. Some dialects spoken in southern Slovenia transition into Chakavian or Kajkavian Serbo-Croatian , while

6720-484: The shortening of post-accent lengths is in progress in all Shtokavian vernaculars, even in those most conservative in Montenegro. Stress shift to enclitics is, however, in northern Serbia rare and mostly limited to negative verb constructs ( ne znam = I don't know > /nê znaːm/ ). The situation in Croatia, is however, different. A large proportion of speakers of Croatian, especially those coming from Zagreb , do not distinguish between rising and falling accents. This

6804-504: The transition from eastern dialects to Kajkavian is general, with cases of essentially the same linguistic variety spoken on both sides of the border (this is particularly true for the upper course of the Kupa and Sutla rivers). The table below compares grammatical and phonological innovations. The similarity of Kajkavian and Slovene is apparent. In broad terms, the Eastern dialects of South Slavic (Bulgarian and Macedonian) differ most from

6888-658: The word krilatec ). The Freising manuscripts are the first Latin-script continuous text in a Slavic language. The migration of Slavic speakers into the Balkans in the declining centuries of the Byzantine Empire expanded the area of Slavic speech, but the pre-existing writing (notably Greek) survived in this area. The arrival of the Hungarians in Pannonia in the 9th century interposed non-Slavic speakers between South and West Slavs. Frankish conquests completed

6972-663: Was also used in the Middle Ages (most notably in Bulgaria, Macedonia and Croatia), but gradually disappeared. Slavic languages The Slavic languages , also known as the Slavonic languages , are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic , spoken during the Early Middle Ages , which in turn

7056-648: Was the variety of the Eastern South Slavic spoken in Thessaloniki , now called Old Church Slavonic , in the ninth century. It is retained as a liturgical language in Slavic Orthodox churches in the form of various local Church Slavonic traditions. The South Slavic languages constitute a dialect continuum . Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin constitute a single dialect within this continuum. The Slavic languages are part of

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