12 Facts About Slavic languages

Slavic languages, known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants.

Slavic languages are conventionally divided into three subgroups: East, South, and West, which together constitute more than 20 languages.

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, 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.

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Slavic languages descend from Proto-Slavic, their immediate parent language, ultimately deriving from Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor language of all Indo-European languages, via a Proto-Balto-Slavic stage.

Lockwood notes that these Slavic languages have "enriched" themselves by drawing on Church Slavonic for the vocabulary of abstract concepts.

East Slavic languages is generally thought to converge to one Old East Slavic languages language, which existed until at least the 12th century.

Kassian-Dybo's tree suggests that Proto-Slavic languages first diverged into three branches: Eastern, Western and Southern.

Common Slavic languages had a complex system of prosody, inherited with little change from Proto-Indo-European.

Similarly, Slavic languages have extensive morphophonemic alternations in their derivational and inflectional morphology, including between velar and postalveolar consonants, front and back vowels, and a vowel and no vowel.

Max Vasmer, a specialist in Slavic languages etymology, has claimed that there were no Slavic languages loans into Proto-Germanic.