Protoslawischen

Proto-Slavic is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Slavic languages and a branch of the larger Indo-European language family. It is not directly attested in any surviving texts; knowledge about it comes from the comparative method, using shared features across Slavic languages such as Old Church Slavonic, East Slavic, West Slavic, and South Slavic dialects.

Dating and homeland: The time frame is debated; estimates place the divergence of Proto-Slavic into its major branches sometime in the first few centuries CE, with the language itself likely spoken earlier, perhaps in the late Bronze to early Iron Age. The homeland is commonly placed in the forest-steppe region of Eastern Europe, around the Pripet Marshes and the Dnieper basin, although precise boundaries are uncertain.

Features: Reconstructions suggest Proto-Slavic had a consonant system including both hard and soft (palatalized) consonants, a vowel inventory typical of Indo-European, and a set of sibilants that later split into multiple Slavic consonant series. The morphology was highly inflectional, with a seven-case noun system (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, and vocative), three grammatical genders, and a robust verb system with aspect and tense features that later develop into the Slavic aspectual pairings.

Descendants: Proto-Slavic gave rise to West, East, and South Slavic languages, including Polish, Czech, Slovak, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and more.

Evidence: No direct texts exist; evidence comes from cognates across Slavic languages, Old Church Slavonic, toponyms, loanwords, and the comparative method.