The Slavic languages: an introduction Slavic Languages is a subgroup of Indo European languages and a group of related languages of the

Slavic peoples. Slavic language speakers are found in Eastern and Central Europe, Northern parts of Asia and most parts of the Balkans. At the turn of 21st century, Slavic Languages, also known as Slavonic languages, was spoken by approximately 315 million people. Slavic language group is divided into three branches. The first branch known as Eastern Slavic branch consists of Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian. The second branch is known as South Slavic branch and consists of two sub-groups: Eastern and Western group. The Eastern sub-group consists of Bulgarian, Church Slavonic, and Macedonian; while the Western sub-group has Serbo-Croatian and Slovenia. The West Slavic branch consists of Czech, Polish, Slovak, Sorbian and Lechitic. There are also some Slavic languages which are believed to have existed. They include: Old Church Slavonic, Old East Slavic, Knaanic, Old Polish, Pomeranian, and Ruthenian. Some linguists also believe that there was North Slavic branch which existed as well. The term North Slavic, is sometimes used to combine East and West Slavic languages into one, because these two branches of languages have some similar traits. However, there are also some differences between the East and West branches. While the West Slavic languages are written in Latin alphabet, the East Slavic languages are written in Cyrillic. In addition to that, the East Slavic languages absorbed many international words of French, Latin, Italian, and German origin; during and after Peter the Great's Europeanization crusade. All Slavic languages share some common features. For instance, they are all having rich morphology due to conserving of the inflectional morphology of Proto-Indo-European. Most of their verbs also come in pairs with one part having a perfective aspect and the other having an imperfective aspect. Moreover, all Slavic languages have a considerable number of palatal and palatalized consonants. They also exhibit extensive morphophonemic alternations in their inflectional and derivational morphology. Grammatically, all Slavic languages apart from Bulgarian and Macedonian have a highly developed inflection of the noun. Slavic verbs take one of three simple tenses that is: past, present and future. Moreover, the vocabulary of the Slavic languages is considerably of Indo-European origin. Most Slavic languages also reflect the old Proto-Slavic pattern of 7 case forms ranging from: genitive, dative, nominative, locative, instrumental, accusative and vocative. These occurs both in singular and plural. Slavic languages descended from Proto-Slavic language which is their intermediate parent language, eventually originating from Proto-Indo-European, which is the ancestor language. Proto-Slavic language is believed to have existed to mid first millennium AD. At around 7th century, it had broken apart into large dialectal zones. It is believed that East Slavic converged to one Old Russian which existed at least until the 12th century. It is also believed that South Slavs came to the Balkan in two streams. Although Slavic languages split from one proto-language, dialects within an individual Slavic language may vary to a greater degree as those of Slovene, or to a lesser degree as those of Russian. We specialize in translation of the Slavic languages. Let us know if we can help you out.

Do you need more translation information or advice? Everything you need to know about translation, Slavic languages and much more is at http://www.slavistix.nl/en. Visit now. Mikhail Krasnotsvetov is the owner of Slavistix Translation Services. A translation agency that provides a full range of translation services from and to all Slavic languages.