Slaviclanguage

Slaviclanguage refers to the Slavic language family, a major branch of the Indo-European languages. The family is traditionally divided into three groups: East Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian), West Slavic (Polish, Czech, Slovak, Sorbian), and South Slavic (Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Montenegrin). These languages are spoken by hundreds of millions across Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and parts of northern Asia.

Slavic languages descend from Proto-Slavic and began to diversify in the early medieval period, between the 6th and 9th centuries. They use two primary scripts: Cyrillic in many East and South Slavic languages, and Latin in most West Slavic languages; some South Slavic languages use both scripts. Bulgarian uses Cyrillic exclusively; Serbian uses both scripts.

Grammatical systems are highly inflected, with gender, number, and a case system in the noun phrases (six to seven cases in most languages). Verbs encode aspect and tense, with perfective and imperfective forms and various prefixes. Phonology often features consonant palatalization and, in some languages, vowel reduction and stress variation that affect morphology.

Today, Slavic languages have standardized national varieties, extensive literary traditions, and active media ecosystems. Mutual intelligibility varies by language pair and dialect; contact, loanwords, and regional policy shape ongoing change within multilingual states and diaspora communities.