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The history of the Slavic languages stretches over 3000 years, from the point at which the ancestral Proto-Balto-Slavic language broke up (c. 1500 BC) into the modern-day Slavic languages which are today natively spoken in Eastern, Central and Southeastern Europe as well as parts of North Asia and Central Asia.

The first 2000 years or so consist of the pre-Slavic era: a long, stable period of gradual development during which the language remained unified, with no discernible dialectal differences.

The last stage in which the language remained without internal differences can be dated to around 500 AD and is sometimes termed Proto-Slavic proper or Early Proto-Slavic. Following this is the Common Slavic period (c. 500–1000 AD), during which the first dialectal differences appeared but the entire Slavic-speaking area continued to function as a single language, with sound changes tending to spread throughout the entire area.

By around 1000 AD, the area had broken up into separate East Slavic, West Slavic and South Slavic languages, and in the following centuries, i.e. 11–14th century, it broke up further into the various modern Slavic languages, of which the following are extant: Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn and Ukrainian in the East; Czech, Slovak, Polish, Kashubian and the Sorbian languages in the West, and Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian and Slovene in the South.

The period from the early centuries AD to the end of the Common Slavic period around 1000 AD was a time of rapid change, concurrent with the explosive growth of the Slavic-speaking era. By the end of this period, most of the features of the modern Slavic languages had been established.

The first historical documentation of the Slavic languages is found in isolated names and words in Greek documents starting in the 6th century AD, when Slavic-speaking tribes first came in contact with the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire.

The first continuous texts date from the late 9th century AD and were written in Old Church Slavonic—the first Slavic literary language, based on the South Slavic dialects spoken around Thessaloniki in Greek Macedonia—as part of the Christianization of the Slavs by Saints Cyril and Methodius and their followers. Because these texts were written during the Common Slavic period, the language they document is close to the ancestral Proto-Slavic language and is critically important to the linguistic reconstruction of Slavic-language history.

This article covers the development of the Slavic languages from the end of the Common Slavic period (c. 1000 AD) to the present time. See the article on Proto-Slavic for a description of the Proto-Slavic language of the late first millennium AD, and history of Proto-Slavic for the earlier linguistic history of this language.

Origin

The development into Proto-Slavic probably occurred along the southern periphery of the Proto-Balto-Slavic continuum. This is concluded from Slavic hydronyms, the most archaic of which are found between the northeastern rim of the Carpathian mountains in the west, along the middle Dnieper, the Pripet, and the upper Dniester river in the east.^[1][2]

Recent glottochronologists^[who?] have dated the split of Proto-Balto-Slavic into its daughter languages between 1300 and 1000 BCE, which suggests that the Komarov and Chernoles cultures would have been Proto-Slavic.

From around 500 BCE to 200 CE, the Scythians and then the Sarmatians expanded their control into the forest steppe. Consequently, a few Eastern Iranian loan words, especially relating to religious and cultural practices, have been seen as evidence of cultural influences.^[3] Subsequently, loan words of Germanic origin also appear. This is connected to the movement of east Germanic groups into the Vistula basin, and subsequently to the middle Dnieper basin, associated with the appearance of the Przeworsk and Chernyakhov cultures, respectively.

Into the Common Era, the various Balto-Slavic dialects formed a dialect continuum stretching from the Vistula to the Don and Oka basins, and from the Baltic and upper Volga to southern Russia and northern Ukraine.^[4] Beginning around 500 CE, the Slavic speakers rapidly expanded in all directions from a homeland in eastern Poland and western Ukraine. By the eighth century CE, Proto-Slavic is believed to have been spoken uniformly from Thessaloniki to Novgorod.

Notation

See Proto-Balto-Slavic language#Notation for much more detail on the uses of the most commonly encountered diacritics for indicating prosody (á, à, â, ã, ȁ, a̋, ā, ă) and various other phonetic distinctions (ą, ẹ, ė, š, ś, etc.) in different Balto-Slavic languages.

Vowel notation

Two different and conflicting systems for denoting vowels are commonly in use in Indo-European and Balto-Slavic linguistics on the one hand, and Slavic linguistics on the other. In the first, vowel length is consistently distinguished with a macron above the letter, while in the latter it is not clearly indicated. The following table explains these differences:

Vowel	IE/B-S	Slavic
Short front closed vowel (front yer)	i	ĭ or ь
Short back closed vowel (back yer)	u	ŭ or ъ
Short back open vowel	a	o
Long front closed vowel	ī	i
Long back closed vowel	ū	y
Long front open vowel (yat)	ē	ě
Long back open vowel	ā	a

For consistency, all discussions of sounds up to (but not including) Middle Common Slavic use the common Balto-Slavic notation of vowels, while discussions of Middle and Late Common Slavic (the phonology and grammar sections) and later dialects use the Slavic notation.

Other vowel and consonant diacritics

Other marks used within Balto-Slavic and Slavic linguistics are:

• The haček on consonants (č š ž), indicating a "hushing" quality , as in English kitchen, mission, vision.
• Various strongly palatal or palatalized consonants (a more "hissing" quality) usually indicated by an acute accent (ć ǵ ḱ ĺ ń ŕ ś ź) or a haček (ď ľ ň ř ť).
• The ogonek (ą ę ǫ), indicating vowel nasalization (in modern standard Lithuanian this is historic only).

Prosodic notation

For Middle and Late Common Slavic, the following marks are used to indicate prosodic distinctions, based on the standard notation in Serbo-Croatian:

• Long rising (á): This indicates the Balto-Slavic acute accent in Middle Common Slavic only.
• Short rising (à): This indicates the Balto-Slavic acute accent in Late Common Slavic, where it was shortened.
• Long falling (ȃ): This normally indicates the Balto-Slavic circumflex accent. In Late Common Slavic, it also indicates originally short (falling) accent that was lengthened in monosyllables. This secondary circumflex occurs only on the short vowels e, o, ь, ъ in an open syllable (i.e. when not forming part of a liquid diphthong).
• Short falling (ȁ): This indicates the Balto-Slavic short accent. In Late Common Slavic, this accent was lengthened in monosyllables (see preceding entry).
• Neoacute (ã): This indicates the Late Common Slavic neoacute accent, which was pronounced as a rising accent, usually long but short when occurring on some syllable types in certain languages. This results from retraction of the accent, i.e. the Middle Common Slavic accent fell on the following syllable (usually specifically a weak yer).

Other prosodic diacritics

There are multiple competing systems used to indicate prosody in different Balto-Slavic languages (see Proto-Balto-Slavic language#Notation for more details). The most important for this article are:

1. Three-way system of Proto-Slavic, Proto-Balto-Slavic, modern Lithuanian: Acute tone (á) vs. circumflex tone (ȃ or ã) vs. short accent (à).
2. Four-way Serbo-Croatian system, also used in Slovene and often in Slavic reconstructions: long rising (á), short rising (à), long falling (ȃ), short falling (ȁ). In the Chakavian dialect and other archaic dialects, the long rising accent is notated with a tilde (ã), indicating its normal origin in the Late Common Slavic neoacute accent (see above).
3. Length only, as in Czech and Slovak: long (á) vs. short (a).
4. Stress only, as in Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian: stressed (á) vs. unstressed (a).

Dialectal differentiation

The breakup of Common Slavic was gradual and many sound changes (such as the second regressive palatalization) still propagated throughout what must have been by then a dialect continuum. However, several changes were more restricted, or had different outcomes.

The end of the Common Slavic period occurred with the loss of the yers (weak high vowels, derived from Proto-Balto-Slavic and ultimately Proto-Indo-European *i and *u). This ended the era of syllabic synharmony (when most, originally all, syllables were open) by creating large numbers of closed syllables. The conditions for which yers were strong and which ones weak is the same across most or all Slavic languages, but the particular outcomes are drastically different.

The clusters *tl and *dl were lost in all but West Slavic, being normally simplified to *l. Exceptions are some Northern Russian dialects where they instead changed to *kl and *gl respectively (today only traces of this remain)^[5] and the Gail Valley dialect of Slovene (with traces in other Carinthian dialects).^[6][7]

For many Common Slavic dialects—including most of West Slavic, all but the northernmost portions of East Slavic, and some western parts of South Slavic—Proto-Slavic *g lenited from a voiced velar plosive to a voiced velar fricative ( → ). This remains in some modern languages: for example, Czech hlava /ɦlava/^ⓘ, Belarusian галава́ /ɣalaˈva/^ⓘ, Ukrainian голова́ /ɦoloˈwa/^ⓘ, which developed from Proto-Slavic *golvà. Because this change was not universal and because it did not occur for a number of East Slavic dialects (such as Belarusian and South Russian) until after the application of Havlík's law, Shevelov (1977) calls into question early projections of this change and postulates three independent instigations of lenition, dating the earliest to before 900 CE and the latest to the early thirteenth century.^[8]

Overview of languages

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The Slavic languages are generally divided into East Slavic, South Slavic and West Slavic. For most comparative purposes, however, South Slavic does not function as a unit. Bulgarian and Macedonian, while quite similar to each other, are radically different from the other South Slavic languages in phonology and grammar. The phonology of Bulgarian and Macedonian is similar to East Slavic rather than their nearest Slavic neighbor Serbo-Croatian^{[citation needed]} (suggesting an early East–West divide across the whole Slavic territory^{[citation needed]}, before South Slavic was separated from the rest of the Slavic languages by the spread of Hungarian and Romanian). In grammar, Bulgarian and Macedonian have developed distinctly from all other Slavic languages, eliminating nearly all case distinctions (strongly preserved elsewhere), but preserving and even strengthening the older Indo-European^{[citation needed]} aspectual system consisting of synthetic aorist and imperfect tenses (largely eliminated elsewhere in favor of the new Slavic aspectual system).

Old Church Slavonic (OCS) data are especially important for the reconstruction of Late Common Slavic (LCS). The major exception is LCS accent, which can only be reconstructed from modern Slavic dialects.

Palatalization

At least six separate sound changes involving palatalization can be identified in the history of the Slavic languages:

1. Satemization, which converted Proto-Indo-European (PIE) front velars *ḱ, *ǵ, *ǵh into Balto-Slavic *ś, *ź, *ź, and further into Slavic *s, *z, *z.
2. The first regressive palatalization of velars.
3. The second regressive palatalization of velars.
4. The progressive palatalization of velars.
5. Iotation, which palatalized all consonants before *j.
6. General palatalization of all consonants before front vowels (not in all languages).

The first palatalization (satemization) is reflected in all Balto-Slavic languages, while the rest are represented in nearly all Slavic languages. (The Old Novgorod dialect did not undergo the second regressive palatalization, and underwent the progressive palatalization only partly.)

Velar palatalization outcomes

The outcome of the first regressive palatalization is uniform across all Slavic languages, showing that it happened fairly early. The outcome of the second regressive palatalization shows more variety. It is possible, however, that this is a later development. Many authors reconstruct a uniform outcome *ś,^[9][10] which only later resolves into *s or *š. (According to Aleksandar Belić, the phonetic character of the palatalizations was uniform throughout Common Slavic and West Slavic languages developed *š later on by analogy.^[11]) In all dialects (except for Lechitic), was deaffricated to , but is still found in a few of the earlier Old Church Slavonic texts, where it is represented by the special letter Dze (Ѕ).^[12]

The following table illustrates the differences between the different dialects as far as phonetic realization of the three velar palatalizations:

		1st regressive			2nd regressive, Progressive
Pre-Slavic		k	g	x	k	g	x
Common Slavic		č	ž	š	c	dz	ś
East Slavic		č	ž	š	c	z	s
South Slavic
West Slavic	Lechitic					dz	š
	Other					z

Some dialects (in particular South Slavic), allowed the second regressive palatalization to occur across an intervening *v.^[12] For example, Early Common Slavic *gvaizdā "star", which developed into Middle-Late Common Slavic *gvězda:

• palatalized:
  • Russian: звезда zvʲɪˈzda^ⓘ
  • Slovene: zvézda ˈzʋèːzda
  • Serbo-Croatian: zvijezda ˈzʋiěːzda / zvézda ˈzʋěːzda
  • Bulgarian: звезда zvɛzˈda
  • Macedonian: ѕвезда ˈdzvɛzda
• unpalatalized:
  • Polish: gwiazda ˈɡvʲazda^ⓘ
  • Czech: hvězda ˈɦvjezda^ⓘ

Iotation outcomesedit

The outcomes of most cases of iotation are the same in all Slavic languages; for the chart of outcomes, see Iotation#Sound change.

The phonemes *ť (from earlier *tj and *gt/kt) and *ď (from earlier *dj) generally merged into various other phonemes in the various Slavic languages, but they merged with different ones in each, showing that this was still a separate phoneme in Proto-Slavic. Compare:

	Proto-Slavic	OCS	Bulg.	Mac.	S-C	Slvn.	Czech	Slvk.	Pol.	Bel.	Ukr.	Rusyn	Russ.
Written	*ť	št	št	ḱ	ć	č	c	c	c	č	č	č	č
IPA	*c(ː)	ʃt	ʃt	c	t͡ɕ	t͡ʃ	t͡s	t͡s	t͡s	t͡ʃ	t͡ʃ	t͡ɕ	t͡ɕ
Written	*ď	žd	žd	ǵ	đ	j	z	dz	dz	ž	ž	ž	ž
IPA	*ɟ(ː)	ʒd	ʒd	ɟ	d͡ʑ	j	z	d͡z	d͡z	ʒ	ʒ	ʒ	ʐ

The exact pronunciation of *ť and *ď in Proto-Slavic is unclear, but they may have sounded as geminate palatal stops /cː/ and /ɟː/.^[13]

The OCS and Bulgarian outcome is somewhat unusual as it is not an affricate but rather a fricative followed by a stop, having undergone metathesis. In Macedonian, the outcome is non-sibilant.

In Proto-Slavic, iotated *ľ *ň *ř contrasted with non-iotated *l *n *r, including before front vowels. This distinction was still apparent in Old Church Slavonic, although they aren't always consistently marked (least for *ř, which may have already been merging with *r' at the time the Old Church Slavonic manuscripts were written or copied). In Southwest Slavic (modern Serbo-Croatian and Slovene), this contrast remains to this day. In the other Slavic variants, however, regular *l *n *r developed palatalised variants before front vowels, and these merged with the existing iotated *ľ *ň *ř.

General palatalizationedit

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In most languages (but not Serbo-Croatian or Slovene), a general palatalization of consonants before front vowels (including the front yer ь), as well as of *r in *ьr, occurred at the end of the Common Slavic period, shortly before the loss of weak yers. The loss of the weak yers made these sounds phonemic, nearly doubling the number of phonemes present. The already palatal or palatalized sounds — the outcomes of the velar palatalizations and iotation — were unchanged. Newly palatalized sounds *l' *n' *r' merged with palatal *ľ *ň *ř from iotation. However, newly palatalized *t' *d' *s' *z' did not usually merge with existing *ť *ď (from iotation) or *č *š *(d)ž (from the first palatalization of velars).

The new sounds were later depalatalized to varying degrees in all Slavic languages, merging back into the corresponding non-palatal sound. This has happened the least in Russian and Polish: before another consonant, except for l', which was always preserved, as in сколько skol'ko "how many", and dentals before labials, as in тьма t'ma / ćma "darkness", and before a pause for labials. r' was depalatalized early before dentals, as in чёрт čort / czart "devil", but otherwise has been preserved in Polish and in many Russian dialects, as well as for some older standard speakers, who pronounce верх as ver'h (cf. Polish wierzch). In many cases palatalization was analogically restored later, particularly in Russian. Russian has also introduced an unusual four-way distinction between non-palatal C, palatal C', the sequence C'j of palatal + /j/ (from Common Slavic *Cьj with weak ь), and the sequence Cj of non-palatal + /j/ (only across a clear morpheme boundary, when a prefix is followed by a morpheme-initial /j/); however, only dentals show a clear contrast before j.

Czech underwent a general depalatalization in the 13th century. It might be argued that Czech never underwent palatalization at all in most cases, but the Czech sound ř (an unusual fricative trill) is found everywhere that *r followed by a front vowel is reconstructed in Late Common Slavic. This suggests that former *r' escaped depalatalization because it had evolved into a new sound — no longer paired with a corresponding non-palatal sound — by the time that depalatalization occurred.

The same thing happened more broadly in Polish — paired palatalized sounds occur only before vowels, but original *r' *l' *t' *d' *s' *z' are reflected differently from *r *l *t *d *s *z even word-finally and before consonants, because all six pairs had diverged by the time any depalatalization occurred. *r' evolved as in Czech, later becoming /ʐ/, but still written rz. *t' *d' *s' *z' evolved into alveolopalatal consonants; and in the case of *l', non-palatal *l evolved into a back velar /ɫ/ and then further into ?pojem=, still written ł.

In Bulgarian, distinctively palatalized consonants are found only before /a o u/. Velars are allophonically palatalized before front vowels in standard Bulgarian; the same thing happens to all consonants in Eastern Bulgarian.

Palatalization triggered a general merger of Common Slavic *y and *i. In East Slavic and Polish, the two sounds became allophones, with ɨ occurring after non-palatal sounds and i after palatal or palatalized sounds. In Czech, Slovak and South Slavic, the two sounds merged entirely (although in Czech, *i triggered palatalization of t d n prior to the merger, and in Slovak, it triggered palatalization of t d n l).

Researchers differ in whether the paired palatalized consonants should be analyzed as separate phonemes. Almost all analyses of Russian posit phonemic palatalized consonants due to their occurrence word-finally and before consonants, and due to the phonemic distinction between /C'/ and /C'j/. In Polish and Bulgarian, however, many researchers treat some or all paired palatalized consonants as underlying sequences of non-palatal consonant + /j/. Researchers who do this in Polish also generally treat the sounds ɨ and i as separate phonemes.

The yers ь and ъedit

Strong vs. weak yersedit

The two vowels ь and ъ, known as (front and back) yer, were originally pronounced as short high vowels. During the late Proto-Slavic period, a pattern emerged in these vowels which characterised a yer as either "strong" or "weak". This change is known as Havlík's law. A yer at the end of a word, or preceding a strong yer or non-yer vowel was weak, and a yer followed by a weak yer became strong. The pattern created sequences of alternating strong and weak yers within each word: in a sequence of yers, every odd yer encountered was weak, every even yer was strong.

The name *sъmolьnьskъ (the Russian city of Smolensk) is shown here as an example, with strong yers in bold and weak yers in italics.

• Nominative singular: *sъmolьnьskъ
• Genitive singular: *sъmolьnьska

During the time immediately following the Common Slavic period, weak yers were gradually deleted. A deleted front yer ь often left palatalization of the preceding consonant as a trace. Strong yers underwent lowering and became mid vowels, but the outcomes differ somewhat across the various Slavic languages. Slovene in particular retains a distinct outcome that did not merge with any other vowels, albeit originally only in unstressed syllables, and Bulgarian has an outcome that merged only with nasal ǫ.

Compare:^[14]

Proto-Slavic	OCS	Bulg.	Mac.	S-C	Slvn.	Czech	Slvk.	Pol.	USorb	LSorb	Bel.	Russ.	Ukr.
strong *ь	ь	e, ă	e	a	ǝ,a	e	e (a,á,o)	'e	e	e	'e	'e	e
strong *ъ	ъ	ă	o	a	ǝ,a	e	o (e,a,á)	e	e	e	o	o	o

• An apostrophe indicates palatalization of the preceding consonant.
• The front and back strong yers merged in Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, Czech and Upper and Lower Sorbian.
• In Slovene, /a/ arose from this merged result when stressed, /ə/ otherwise. /a/ was later often replaced by /ə/ analogically.
• In Central (standard) Slovak, the normal outcomes of *ь *ъ are e o, but various other sounds often appear, unpredictably. In East and West Slovak dialects, both yers merge and become e, as in Czech.

Examplesedit

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Examples (nom. and gen. sg. given except as indicated)^[14]

	"dog"	"day"	"dream"	"moss"
Middle Proto-Slavic	*pьsь̏ ~ *pьsá	*dь̏nь ~ *dь̏ne	*sъnъ̏ ~ *sъná	*mъ̏xъ/mъxъ̏ ~ *mъxá/mъ̏xa
Late Proto-Slavic	*pь̃sь ~ *pьsà	*dь̑nь ~ *dьnȅ	*sъ̃nъ ~ *sъnà	*mъ̂xъ/mъ̃xъ ~ *mъxà/*mъxȁ
Bulgarian	pes ~ pséta, pésove (pl.)	den ~ déna, dni (pl.)	săn ~ sắništa (pl.)	măx ~ mắxa, mắxove (pl.)
Serbo-Croatian	pȁs ~ psȁ	dȃn ~ dȃna	sȁn ~ snȁ	mȃh ~ mȁha
Slovene	pǝ̀s ~ psà	dȃn ~ dnẹ̑/dnẹ̑va	sǝ̀n ~ snà	mȃh ~ mȃha/mahȗ; mèh ~ méha
Macedonian	pes ~ pl. pci, pcišta	den ~ pl. denovi, dni	son ~ pl. soništa, sništa	mov (uncount. n.)
Russian	p'os (< p'es) ~ psa	d'en' ~ dn'a	son ~ sna	mox ~ mxa/móxa
Czech	pes ~ psa	den ~ dne	sen ~ snu	mech ~ mechu
Slovak	pes ~ psa	deň ~ dňa	sen ~ sna