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Subgroup of Slavic languages, currently spoken in Eastern Europe.
Current East Slavic languages: Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian and others.
For politcal reasons, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian are considered by some to be dialects of a single language (often identified as Russian) rather than separate languages in their own right. This raises the question of polital vs purely linguistic criterion in the designation of individual languages. Linguists consider each of these three languages to be separate languages in their own right. The languages are somewhat similar, enough to provide a continuum of partial mutual intelligibility over borderland portion of the area of these languages.
All these languages use Cyrillic alphabet with minor modifications.
History
The classic genetic 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 predecessor of the modern Ukrainian and Belarusian languages in the language of Old Ruthenian. According to this theory the language to the north, Russian, developed almost exclusively from Old Slavonic, while Ukrainian and Belarusian developed from a common ancestor, Old Ruthenian. The divergence of Old Ruthenian and Russian is evident in the 1100s. The old Ruthenian language then diverges into Belarusian and Ukrainian in the 16-17th centuries.