nonSlavic

NonSlavic, often written non-Slavic, is a label used in linguistics and ethnography for languages and peoples that are not part of the Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. The term is descriptive, applied to linguistic groups and cultural communities outside East, West, and South Slavic languages, and it is not a fixed ethnolinguistic category.

Within Europe, Slavic languages include Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Slovenian, and Macedonian, among others. Non-Slavic languages in the broader region cover Germanic languages (German, English, Dutch), Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian), Baltic languages (Lithuanian, Latvian), Finno-Ugric languages (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian), Albanian, Greek, Turkish, and Romani (an Indo-Aryan language).

Geographically, non-Slavic communities appear across Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe—such as Germans and Austrians in Central Europe, Greeks and Albanians in the Balkans, Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin, and Finns and Balts in the north. In neighboring areas of Asia, non-Slavic languages include Turkic languages like Kazakh and Tatar, as well as various Iranian and Caucasian languages.

Usage and caveats: non-Slavic is a broad, descriptive term rather than a precise linguistic unit. Many non-Slavic languages have long-standing contact with Slavic languages and communities, and contemporary identities are fluid; groups may be bilingual or shift languages over time.