History of Proto-Slavic

The first 2,000 years or so consist of the pre-Slavic era, a long period during which none of the later dialectal differences between Slavic languages had yet emerged.

The first continuous texts date from the late 9th century[citation needed] and were written in Old Church Slavonic—based on the Slavic dialect used in the region of Thessaloniki in Greek Macedonia—as part of the Christianization of the Slavs by Saints Cyril and Methodius and their followers.

Proto-Slavic gradually evolved into the various Slavic languages during the latter half of the first millennium AD, concurrent with the explosive growth of the Slavic-speaking area.

The currently most favoured model, the Kurgan hypothesis, places the Urheimat of the Proto-Indo-European people in the Pontic steppe, represented archaeologically by the 5th millennium BCE Sredny Stog culture.

[4] Apart from a proposed genetic relationship (PIE forming a Germano-Balto-Slavic sub-branch),[5] the similarities are likely due to continuous contacts, whereby common loan words spread through the communities in the forest zones at an early time of their linguistic development.

[4] Similarly, Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian might have formed some kind of continuum from the north-west to the south-east, given that they share both satemization and the Ruki sound law.

[4] On the other hand, genetic studies have shown that Slavs and North Indians share much larger amounts of the R1a haplogroup (associated with the spread of Indo-European languages) than do most Germanic populations.

[8] Indeed, Trubachev argues that this location fostered contacts between speakers of Pre-Proto-Slavic with the cultural innovations which emanated from central Europe and the steppe.

Another important aspect of this period is that the Iranian dialects of the Scythians and Sarmatians had a considerable impact on the Slavic vocabulary, during the extensive contacts between the aforementioned languages and (early) Proto-Slavic for about a millennium,[17] and the eventual absorption and assimilation (e.g. Slavicisation) of the Iranian-speaking Scythians, Sarmatians, and Alans in Eastern Europe by the Proto-Slavic population of the region.

As it expanded throughout eastern Europe, it obliterated whatever remained of easternmost Celtic, Avar, Venetic, possibly Dacian, as well as many other Balto-Slavic dialects,[22] and the Slav ethnonym spread out considerably.

[24] Literary and archaeological evidence suggests that eastern European barbaricum in the 6th century was linguistically and culturally diverse,[25][26] somewhat going against the idea of a large demographic expansion of an ethnically homogeneous Slavic people.

Instead, Proto-Slavic might have been a lingua franca among the various barbarian ethnicities that emerged in the Danubian, Carpathian and steppe regions of Europe after the fall of the Hun Empire,[27] such as the Sklaveni, Antes, and Avars.

"[16] This has been substantiated archaeologically, seen by the development of networks which spread of "Slavic fibulae", artifacts representing social status and group identity.

[28] Horace Lunt argues that only as a lingua franca could Slavic have remained mutually intelligible over vast areas of Europe, and that its disintegration into different dialects occurred after the collapse of the Avar khanate.

[29] However, even proponents of this theory concede that it fails to explain how Slavic spread to the Baltic and western Russia, areas which had no historical connection with the Avar Empire.

The onomastic evidence and glosses of Slavic words in foreign-language texts show no detectable regional differences during this period.

It is thought that the distinction of long and short vowels by quality, normally reflected in "Proto-Slavic" reconstructed forms, occurred during this time: Greek transcriptions from the 5th and 6th centuries still indicate Common Slavic *o as a.

In addition, migrations of Uralic speaking peoples into modern Hungary and Romania[citation needed] created geographic separations between Slavic dialects.

The progressive palatalization of velars, if it is older, can predate this only by 200 to 300 years at most, since it post-dates Proto-Germanic borrowings into Slavic, which are generally agreed to have occurred no earlier than the 2nd century.

However, it is still reasonably close, and the mutual intelligibility between Old Church Slavonic and other Slavic dialects of those days was proved by Cyril and Methodius' mission to Great Moravia and Pannonia.

See Proto-Balto-Slavic language#Notation for much more detail on the uses of the most commonly encountered diacritics for indicating prosody (á, à, â, ã, ȁ, a̋, ā, ă) and various other phonetic distinctions (ą, ẹ, ė, š, ś, etc.)

Other marks used within Balto-Slavic and Slavic linguistics are: For Middle and Late Common Slavic, the following marks are used to indicate prosodic distinctions, based on the standard notation in Serbo-Croatian: There are multiple competing systems used to indicate prosody in different Balto-Slavic languages (see Proto-Balto-Slavic language#Notation for more details).

Another tendency arose in the Common Slavic period wherein successive segmental phonemes in a syllable assimilated articulatory features (primarily place of articulation).

In the case of the palatal consonants that had resulted from the first regressive palatalization, the *j simply disappeared without altering the preceding consonant: In both East and South Slavic, labial consonants (*m, *b, *p, *v) were also affected by iotation, acquiring a lateral off-glide ľ /lʲ/: Many researchers believe that this change actually occurred throughout Proto-Slavic and was later 'reversed' in West Slavic and in most dialects of the Eastern subgroup of South Slavic languages (Macedonian and Bulgarian, and the transitional Torlakian dialect) by analogy with related word forms lacking the lateral.

The result of this fronting was as follows (with J acting as a cover symbol for any consonant with a palatal articulation): Towards the end of the Late Common Slavic period, an opposing change happened, in which long *Jē was backed to *Jā.

However, it did operate on the high nasal vowel *ų, leading to alternations, e.g. Old Church Slavonic accusative plural raby "slaves" (< *-ų̄) vs. koňę "horses" (< *-jį̄ < *-jų̄).

During the Common Slavic period, prothetic glides were inserted before words that began with vowels, consistent with the tendency for rising sonority within a syllable.

For example, the name of the Varangians, from Old Norse Væringi, appears in Old East Slavic as варѧгъ varęgъ, with no evidence of the progressive palatalization (had it followed the full development as "king" did, the result would have been **varędzь instead).

Traditionally, it is held that Late Common Slavic retained the original distribution of short and long vowels, as it was inherited from Proto-Balto-Slavic.

During the Late Common Slavic period, the short close vowels *ь *ъ (known as yers) developed into "strong" and "weak" variants according to Havlík's law.