Slavic Languages

Slavic languages are the native languages for 300 million people. The Slavic languages belong to the Indo-European languages. There are about 20 Slavic languages. The most prominent among them is Russian. More than 150 million people speak Russian as their native tongue. After that come Polish and Ukrainian with 50 million speakers each. In linguistics, the Slavic languages are divided into different groups. There are West Slavic, East Slavic and South Slavic languages. West Slavic languages are Polish, Czech and Slovakian. Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian are East Slavic languages. South Slavic languages are Serbian, Croatian and Bulgarian. There are many other Slavic languages besides those. But these are spoken by relatively few people. The Slavic languages belong to a common proto-language. The individual languages evolved from this relatively late. They are therefore younger than the Germanic and Romance languages. The majority of the vocabulary of the Slavic languages is similar. This is because they didn't separate from each other until relatively late. From a scientific perspective, the Slavic languages are conservative. Meaning, they still contain many old structures. Other Indo-European languages have lost these old forms. Slavic languages are very interesting to research because of this. By researching them, conclusions can be drawn about earlier languages. In this way, researchers hope to trace back to Indo-European languages. Slavic languages are characterized by few vowels. Aside from that, there are many sounds that do not occur in other languages. Western Europeans in particular often have problems with the pronunciation. But no worries – everything will be okay! In Polish: Wszystko będzie dobrze!

Guess the language!

______ian is a South Slavic language. It is very closely related to Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin. The speakers of these languages can easily communicate among themselves. Therefore, many linguists think that ______ian is not even its own language. They view it as one of the many forms of Serbo-______ian. Approximately 7 million people worldwide speak ______ian. The language is written with Latin letters. The ______ian alphabet has 30 letters, including a few special symbols.

The orthography strictly conforms to the pronunciation of the words. That is also true for words that are borrowed from other languages. The lexical stress of ______ian is melodic. That means that the pitch of the syllables is crucial in the intonation. The grammar has seven cases and is not always simple. It is worth it to learn the ______ian language though. ______ia is a really beautiful vacation spot!