Language Family

Slavic

SLAH-vik

Also Known As Slavonic languages

Eurasian Language Families

Slavic groups the languages descended from Proto-Slavic, conventionally divided into an East Slavic branch (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian), a West Slavic branch (Polish, Czech, Slovak) and a South Slavic branch (Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovene and others), a division scholars broadly agree on even where the boundaries of individual languages within it are debated on political as much as linguistic grounds. The split between Cyrillic-writing and Latin-writing Slavic languages runs along confessional lines rather than branch lines: Orthodox-majority Slavic languages generally adopted Cyrillic and Catholic-majority ones generally adopted Latin script, so Serbian and Croatian, close enough to be mutually intelligible, are written in different alphabets.

Facts

Region

Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and parts of Central Europe and North Asia 1

Speaker Count

315,000,000 2

A midpoint estimate, not a single precise census figure: native-speaker counts alone run closer to 266 million, while broader counts including second-language speakers reach roughly 385 million.

Proto-Language Status

Proto-Slavic is securely reconstructed and itself descends from Proto-Balto-Slavic together with the Baltic languages. Slavic divides into three well established branches, East, West and South Slavic, each recorded on this atlas as its own family entity. 3

Slavic

6 entries

Status

Speaker Count Band

Script Used

Period Start Year

Descends From

Language Kind

Official Status

FAQs

Do all Slavic languages use the same alphabet?

No. Serbian alone is written in both Cyrillic and Latin.

No. Slavic languages are written in more than one script, and Serbian shows this within a single language. Serbian is written in both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, and both are officially recognised, although Cyrillic was made the official script of Serbia's government in 2006. The Glagolitic alphabet was originally used to write Serbian from the 11th century and was later replaced by Cyrillic. The modern Serbian Cyrillic alphabet was devised in 1814 by the Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić, and the Serbian Latin alphabet was designed by the Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj in 1830. Literate Serbians can read and write their language in both scripts.

Connections

Ancestor Of

East Slavic

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica

South Slavic

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica

West Slavic

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica

Associated With

Latin

This source names Latin directly: "The split between Cyrillic-writing and Latin-writing Slavic languages runs along confessional lines rather than branch lines: Orthodox-majority Slavic languages generally adopted Cyrillic and..."

Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)

In Family

Indo-European

Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)

Includes

Bulgarian

Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)

Czech

Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)

Old Church Slavonic

Source Glottolog

Polish

Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)

Russian

Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)

Serbo-Croatian

Source World Atlas of Language Structures: Serbian-Croatian

In the Other Atlases