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A subgroup of Slavic languages, currently spoken in Eastern Europe.
Current East Slavic languages: Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian and others.
For political reasons, these three separate languages have been 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 political 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 to one another, enough to provide some partial mutual intelligibility over the 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 finds 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 the Old Ruthenian and Russian languages is evident in the 1100s. The old Ruthenian language then diverges into Belarusian and Ukrainian in the 16-17th centuries. The Russian language then separtaes from Old Slavonic from 1100 to 1700.