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Subgroup of Slavic languages, currently spoken in Eastern Europe.
Current East Slavic languages: Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian and others.
Ukrainian and Belarusian are considered by some to be dialects of Russian rather than separate languages in their own right. This raises the question of polital vs, purely liguistic criterion in the designation of individual languages. The languages are somewhat similar enough to provide a continuum of partial mutual intelligibility over part of the area of these languages.
All these languages use Cyrillic alphabet with minor modifications.
--History--
The classic gentic schema of the three Eastern Slavic languages is that they each developed separately from a common East Slavic root language. An alternative, more-nuanced view is to posit a predecesor of the modern Ukrainian and Belarusian languages in the language of Old Ruthenian. According to this thetheory the language to the north, Russian, developed almost excluively from Old Slavonic, while Ukrainian and Belarusian devloped from a common ancestor, Old Ruthenian.