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Słowianie Zachodni (Polish) Západní Slované (Czech) Západní Slovania (Slovak) Zôpôdni Słowiónie (Kashubian) Pódwjacorne Słowjany (Lower Sorbian) Zapadni Słowjenjo (Upper Sorbian) Zachodniy Słowjońe (Silesian) | |
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Total population | |
see #Population | |
Regions with significant populations | |
Central Europe | |
Religion | |
Catholicism (Poles, Slovaks, Silesians, Kashubians, Moravians, and Sorbs and minority among Czechs) Protestantism (minority among Sorbs) Irreligion (majority among Czechs)[citation needed] | |
Related ethnic groups | |
Other Slavs |
The West Slavs are Slavic peoples who speak the West Slavic languages.[1][2] They separated from the common Slavic group around the 7th century, and established independent polities in Central Europe by the 8th to 9th centuries.[1] The West Slavic languages diversified into their historically attested forms over the 10th to 14th centuries.[3]
Today, groups which speak West Slavic languages include the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Silesians, Kashubians, and Sorbs.[4][5][6] From the ninth century onwards, most West Slavs converted to Roman Catholicism, thus coming under the cultural influence of the Latin Church, adopting the Latin alphabet, and tending to be more closely integrated into cultural and intellectual developments in western Europe than the East Slavs, who converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity and adopted the Cyrillic alphabet.[7][8]
Linguistically, the West Slavic group can be divided into three subgroups: Lechitic, including Polish, Silesian, Kashubian, and the extinct Polabian and Pomeranian languages; Sorbian in the region of Lusatia; and Czecho–Slovak in the Czech lands.[9]
GRE1
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).The present-day Slavic peoples are usually divided into the three following groups: West Slavic, East Slavic, and South Slavic. This division has both linguistic and historico-geographical justification, in the sense that on the one hand the respective Slavic languages show some old features which unite them into the above three groups, and on the other hand the pre- and early historical migrations of the respective Slavic peoples distributed them geographically in just this way.
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