Slavic languages

The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages) are the Indo-European languages native to the Slavic peoples, originary from Eastern Europe. They are believed to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic spoken during the Early Middle Ages, which in turn would descend from the earlier Proto-Balto-Slavic language, connecting the Slavic languages to the Baltic languages as the Balto-Slavic group of the Indo-European family.

The Slavic languages are divided intro three subgroups: East, West and South, which together constitute more than twenty languages. Of these, ten have at least one million speakers and official status as the national languages of their countries: Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian (of the East group), Polish, Czech and Slovak (of the West group) and Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian and Bulgarian (of the South group).

The current geographic distribution of natively spoken Slavic languages covers Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Eastern parts of Central Europe and all of the territory of Russia, which includes Northern and Central-North Asia. Furthermore, the diasporas of many Slavic peoples stablished isolated minorities of speakers of their languages all around the globe. According to sources, the number of speakers of all Slavic languages together is around 315 million.