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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. 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. Some linguists also consider Rusyn a separate language, although it is sometimes considered a dialect of Ukrainian.

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).

Distribution

Classification

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.

Distinctive features

Vocabulary

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. 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:

Additionally, the original East Slavic phonetic form was kept in many words in Ukrainian and Belarusian, for example:

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. For example:

What's more, all three languages do also have false friends, that sometimes can lead to (big) misunderstandings. 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".

Orthography

Alphabet

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.

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.

Different sound values of letters

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:

Phonology

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Notes

1. Except for the Polesian dialect of Brest
2. Except for the Eastern Polesian dialect
3. Consonants are hard before /e/
4. Except for some dialects
5. In some Ukrainian dialects C/o/C can be /y~y̯e~y̯i~u̯o/
6. In some Ukrainian dialects PSl *ě can be /e̝~i̯ɛ/
7. Also at the end of words (in Russian and Belarusian). In Belarusian (unlike Russian), the change is not present in stressed 2 and 3 sg. pres. ind. endings.
8. Can be /s/ in South Russian
9. ^ In some Northern Russian dialects, Proto-Slavic *c and *č have merged into one sound, variously pronounced as /t͡s, t͡sʲ, t͡ʂ, t͡ɕ/ depending on a dialect.
10. Can be /ɕ/ in Southern Russian
11. Can be /ɕt͡ɕ/, /ʂː/
12. In Russian light affrication can occur: ,
13. In some Northern Russian sub-dialects /v/ is not devoiced to /f/
14. Except for восемь "eight" and some others
15. ^ Only unstressed, Church Slavonic influence
16. Stressed, unstressed is usually reduced to
17. Stressed, unstressed is usually reduced to
18. In colloquial Russian, new vocative has appeared from a pure stem: мам, пап, Маш, Вань etc.
19. In the dialect of Vologda

History

Influence of Church Slavonic

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). The Church Slavonic language was strictly used only in text, while the colloquial language of the Bulgarians was communicated in its spoken form.

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.

See also

• Outline of Slavic history and culture

References

1. "Официальный интернет-портал правовой информации". publication.pravo.gov.ru. Archived from the original on February 5, 2022. Retrieved 2018-11-04.
2. Sussex & Cubberley 2006, pp. 79–89.
3. Pugh 2009, p. 7.
4. Moser 2016, p. 124-139.
5. "Dulichenko, Aleksandr The language of Carpathian Rus': Genetic Aspects" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-06-25. Retrieved 2009-12-12.
6. Comrie, Bernard; Corbett, Greville G. (1 September 2003). The Slavonic Languages. Taylor & Francis. p. 45. ISBN 978-0-203-21320-9. Archived from the original on 15 February 2017. Retrieved 22 November 2017. ...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
7. Moser, Michael A. (2018). "The Fate of the Ruthenian or Little Russian (Ukrainian) Language in Austrian Galicia (1772–1867)". Harvard Ukrainian Studies. 35 (2017–2018) (1/4): 124–139. JSTOR 44983536. Archived from the original on 5 May 2021. Retrieved 28 June 2021.
8. "Указ об учреждении губерний и о росписании к ним городов". constitution.garant.ru. Retrieved 2024-01-15.
9. "Turkic words in Russian". Languages Of The World. 2011-02-14. Retrieved 2024-01-15.
10. "Database of False Friends in Slavic Languages". Danish Portal for East European Studies. Retrieved 2024-01-16.
11. "Фонетика й вимова - Олександр Пономарів". ponomariv-kultura-slova.wikidot.com. Retrieved 2022-11-11.
12. Sussex & Cubberley 2006, pp. 63–65.
13. Sussex & Cubberley 2006, pp. 477–478.

Sources

• Moser, Michael A. (2016). "Rusyn: A New-Old Language In-between Nations and States". The Palgrave Handbook of Slavic Languages, Identities and Borders. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 124–139. doi:10.1007/978-1-137-34839-5_7. ISBN 978-1-349-57703-3. Archived from the original on 14 January 2020. Retrieved 16 October 2019.
• Pugh, Stefan M. (2009). The Rusyn Language. Munich, Germany: LINCOM GmbH. ISBN 978-3-89586-940-2. Archived from the original on 15 December 2021. Retrieved 15 December 2021.
• Sussex, Roland; Cubberley, Paul (2006). The Slavic languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-22315-7.

Further reading

• Comrie, Bernard; Corbett, Greville G, eds. (1993). "East Slavonic languages". The Slavonic languages. London, New York: Routledge. pp. 827–1036. ISBN 0-415-04755-2.

External links

• "Belgorod Residents Speak Their Own Language, Even Russian Linguists Say" by Paul A. Goble, Window on Eurasia (March 24, 2024)

• East Slavic languages