BALTO-SLAVIC

 


Map courtesy of The General Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin

Although Baltic and Slavic are distinct subgroups, they have enough similarities to be grouped together. Baltic divides into western and eastern branches. The major western Baltic language, Old Prussian, died out in the seventeenth century CE. Eastern Baltic is represented today by Lithuanian and Latvian. Although a Baltic language is not attested to until the sixteenth century CE, historical and place-name evidence indicates a Baltic presence for well over a millenium.

Slavic comprises three branches, eastern, western, and southern. The eastern branch comprises Russian, Byelorussian, and Ukrainian. The western branch is represented by Polish, Czech, and Slovak; the southern branch comprises Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian . Slavic is not attested to until the missionaries Cyril and Methodi devised the Cyrillic alphabet in the ninth century CE. They first wrote in a language sometimes called Old Bulgarian, but because it became a liturgical language it is often called Old Church Slavonic (or Old Church Slavic). The Slavic languages developed late, not diverging from proto-Slavic until the beginning of the period of Slavic expansion from around 400 to 900 CE.

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