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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 existent East Slavic languages; Rusyn is mostly considered as a separate language too, but some classify it as 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 Balto-Ruthenian 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 Łacinka and Ukrainian Latin alphabets, respectively (also Rusyn uses Latin in some regions).

Differentiation

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. 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, e.g. Ukr.: солодкий / solodkyj and Bel.: салодкі / salodki vs. Rus.: сладкий / sladkij ("sweet"). Additionally, the original East Slavic phonetic form was kept in many words in Ukrainian and Belarusian, e.g. Ukr.:одиниця / odynycja and Bel. адзінка / adzinka vs. Rus.: eдиница / edinica ("unit").

Orthography

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. Sussex & Cubberley 2006, pp. 79–89.
2. "Dulichenko, Aleksandr The language of Carpathian Rus': Genetic Aspects" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-06-25. Retrieved 2009-12-12.
3. Sussex & Cubberley 2006, pp. 63–65.
4. Sussex & Cubberley 2006, pp. 477–478.

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.
• Sussex, Roland; Cubberley, Paul (2006). The Slavic languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-22315-7.

External links

• Media related to East Slavic languages at Wikimedia Commons

• East Slavic languages