East Slavic languages

East Slavic
Geographic
distribution		Eurasia (Eastern Europe, Northern Asia, and the Caucasus)
Linguistic classificationIndo-European
Early forms
Subdivisions
Language codes
ISO 639-5zle
Glottologeast1426

The East Slavic languages constitute one of three regional subgroups of the Slavic languages, distinct from the West and South Slavic languages. East Slavic languages are currently spoken natively throughout Eastern Europe, and eastwards to Siberia and the Russian Far East.[1] In part due to the large historical influence of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, the Russian language is also spoken as a lingua franca in many regions of Caucasus and Central Asia. Of the three Slavic branches, East Slavic is the most spoken, with the number of native speakers larger than the Western and Southern branches combined.

The common consensus is that Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian are the extant East Slavic languages.[2] Some linguists also consider Rusyn a separate language,[3][4] although it is sometimes considered a dialect of Ukrainian.[5]

The modern East Slavic languages descend from a common predecessor spoken in Kievan Rus' from the 9th to 13th centuries, which later evolved into Ruthenian, the chancery language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the Dnieper river valley, and into medieval Russian in the Volga river valley, the language of the Russian principalities including the Grand Duchy of Moscow.

All these languages use the Cyrillic script, but with particular modifications. Belarusian and Ukrainian, which are descendants of Ruthenian, have a tradition of using Latin-based alphabets—the Belarusian Łacinka and the Ukrainian Latynka alphabets, respectively (also Rusyn uses Latin in some regions, e.g. in Slovakia). The Latin alphabet is traditionally more common in Belarus, while the usage of the Cyrillic script in Russia and Ukraine could never be compared to any other alphabet.[6]

  1. ^ "Официальный интернет-портал правовой информации". publication.pravo.gov.ru. Archived from the original on February 5, 2022. Retrieved 2018-11-04.
  2. ^ Sussex & Cubberley 2006, pp. 79–89.
  3. ^ Pugh 2009, p. 7.
  4. ^ Moser 2016, p. 124-139.
  5. ^ "Dulichenko, Aleksandr The language of Carpathian Rus': Genetic Aspects" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-06-25. Retrieved 2009-12-12.
  6. ^ Comrie, Bernard; Corbett, Greville G. (1 September 2003). The Slavonic Languages. Taylor & Francis. p. 45. ISBN 978-0-203-21320-9. Archived from the original on 15 February 2017. Retrieved 22 November 2017. ...following Vuk's reform of Cyrillic in the early nineteenth century, Ljudevit Gaj in the 1830s performed the same operation on Latinica, using the Czech system and producing a one-to-one symbol correlation between Cyrillic and Latinica as applied to the Serbian and Croatian parallel systems