Balto-Slavic languages

Baltic and Slavic languages share several linguistic traits not found in any other Indo-European branch,[3] which points to a period of common development and origin.

[5] While the notion of a Balto-Slavic unity was previously contested largely due to political controversies, there is now a general consensus among academic specialists in Indo-European linguistics that Baltic and Slavic languages comprise a single branch of the Indo-European language family, with only some minor details of the nature of their relationship remaining in contention.

A few are more intent on explaining the similarities between the two groups not in terms of a linguistically "genetic" relationship, but by language contact and dialectal closeness in the Proto-Indo-European period.

The early Indo-Europeanists Rasmus Rask and August Schleicher (1861) proposed a simple solution: From Proto-Indo-European descended Balto-German-Slavonic language, out of which Proto-Balto-Slavic (later split into Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic) and Germanic emerged.

Antoine Meillet (1905, 1908, 1922, 1925, 1934), a French linguist, in reaction to Brugmann's hypothesis, propounded a view according to which all similarities of Baltic and Slavic occurred accidentally, by independent parallel development, and that there was no Proto-Balto-Slavic language.

[10] Even though some linguists still reject a genetic relationship, most scholars accept that Baltic and Slavic languages experienced a period of common development.

[11][12][13][14] Gray and Atkinson's (2003) application of language-tree divergence analysis supports a genetic relationship between the Baltic and Slavic languages, dating the split of the family to about 1400 BCE.

[15] The traditional division into two distinct sub-branches (i.e. Slavic and Baltic) is mostly upheld by scholars who accept Balto-Slavic as a genetic branch of Indo-European.

[34] Hydronymic evidence suggests that Baltic languages were once spoken in much wider territory than the one they cover today, all the way to Moscow, and were later replaced by Slavic.

Balto-Slavic languages
Various schematic sketches of possible alternative Balto-Slavic language relationships; Van Wijk, 1923
Tree of Balto-Slavic languages
Area of Balto-Slavic dialect continuum ( purple ), with proposed material cultures correlating to speakers of Balto-Slavic in the Bronze Age ( white ); including archaic Slavic hydronyms ( red dots).