Proto-Slavic in the context of Slavicist

The early Slavs were an Indo-European peoples and speakers of the Indo-European dialectswho lived during the Migration Period and the Early Middle Ages (approximately from the 5th to the 10th centuries AD) in Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe and established the foundations for the Slavic nations through the Slavic states of the Early and High Middle Ages. The Slavs' original homeland is still a matter of debate due to a lack of historical records; however, scholars generally place it in Eastern Europe, with Polesia being the most commonly accepted location.

It is generally agreed that ancient Roman writers referred to the ancestors of Slavs as Venedi. The proto-Slavic term Slav shares roots with Slavic terms for speech, word, and perhaps was used by early Slavic people themselves to denote other people, who spoke languages similar to theirs. The first written use of the name "Slavs" dates to the 6th century, when the Slavic tribes inhabited a large portion of Central and Eastern Europe. By then, the nomadic Iranian-speaking peoples living in the European Pontic Steppe (the Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, etc.) had been absorbed by the region's Slavic-speaking population. Over the next two centuries, the Slavs expanded westwards (to the Elbe river and in the Alps), and southwards (into the Balkans, absorbing Illyrian and Thracian peoples in the process), and also moved eastwards (in the direction of the Volga River). Between the sixth and seventh centuries, large parts of Europe came to be controlled or occupied by Slavs, a process less understood and documented than that of the Germanic ethnogenesis in the west. Yet the effects of Slavicization were far more profound.

There are many widely varying names of Germany in different languages, more so than for any other European nation. For example:

• the German language endonym is Deutschland, from the Old High German diutisc, meaning "of the people";
• the French exonym is Allemagne, from the name of the Alamanni tribe;
• in Italian it is Germania, from the Latin Germania, although the German people are called tedeschi, which is cognate with German Deutsch;
• in Polish it is Niemcy, from the Proto-Slavic *němьcь, meaning speechless, since German is not mutually intelligible with Slavic languages;
• in Finnish it is Saksa, from the name of the Saxon tribe;
• in Lithuanian it is Vokietija, of unclear origin, but possibly from Proto-Balto-Slavic *vākyā-, meaning “those who speak loud, shout (unintelligibly)”.

Often language lags behind the changing society and names tend to retain references to first encounters: the Finnish first and foremost met the Saxons while the French faced the Alamanni. Comparable tendencies appear elsewhere, e.g. in names for Russia.

Shtokavian or Štokavian (/ʃtɒˈkɑːviən, -ˈkæv-/; Serbo-Croatian Latin: štokavski / Serbo-Croatian Cyrillic: штокавски, pronounced [ʃtǒːkaʋskiː]) is the prestige supradialect of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language and the basis of its Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian standards. It is a part of the South Slavic dialect continuum. Its name comes from the form for the interrogative pronoun for "what": što. This is in contrast to dialects that are exclusive to Croatian language: Kajkavian and Chakavian (kaj and ča also meaning "what").

Shtokavian is spoken in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the southern part of Austria's Burgenland, much of Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. The primary subdivisions of Shtokavian are based on three principles: one is different accents (whether the subdialect is Old-Shtokavian or Neo-Shtokavian), second is the way the old Slavic phoneme yat has changed (Ikavian, Ijekavian or Ekavian), and third is the presence of the Young Proto-Slavic isogloss (Schakavian or Shtakavian). Modern dialectology generally recognises seven Shtokavian subdialects.

The Polish language is a West Slavic language, and thus descends from Proto-Slavic, and more distantly from Proto-Indo-European; more specifically, it is a member of the Lechitic branch of the West Slavic languages, along with other languages spoken in areas within or close to the area of modern Poland: including Kashubian, Silesian, and the extinct Slovincian and Polabian.

The separation of Polish as a language is conventionally dated at the second half of the 10th century, linked with the establishment of Polish statehood and the Christianization of Poland. The history of the language can then be divided into the following periods periods of development: Old Polish (staropolski) with a pre-literate, pre-Polish era up to 1136, the literate era from 1136 with the Bull of Gniezno up to the start of the 16th century; Middle Polish (średniopolski) from the 16th century until the end of the 18th century (1772) with the first parition of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; New Polish (nowopolski) from 1772-1939; and Modern Polish, since World War II.

Grad (Cyrillic: град) is an Old Slavic word meaning "town", "city", "castle" or "fortified settlement". Initially present in all related languages as gord, it can still be found as grad, gradić, horod or gorod in many placenames today.

These places have grad as part of their name:

A vozhd (romanised from Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian: вождь, also Bulgarian, Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian: вожд, romanized: vožd, Czech: vůdce, Polish: wódz, Slovak: vodca, or Slovene: vodja), literally meaning "the guidesperson" or "the leader", is a historical title with etymology deriving from the Proto-Slavic *voďь and thus common across Slavic languages. It denoted a chieftain of a tribe.

A pan-Slavic language is a zonal auxiliary language for communication among the Slavic peoples.

There are approximately 400 million speakers of the Slavic languages. In order to communicate with each other, speakers of different Slavic languages often resort to international lingua francas, primarily English or Russian. But since Slavic languages are closely related lexically and grammatically and are comparatively easier to learn when another Slavic language is already known, there have been numerous attempts to construct a more neutral auxiliary language that could act as a common language for slavophones. The earliest pan-Slavic linguistic efforts preceded academic knowledge and reconstruction of Proto-Slavic, which was likely spoken between 2nd century BCE and 6th century CE, from which all Slavic languages developed in following centuries.

Little yus (Ѧ) and big yus (Ѫ), or jus, are two letters of the Cyrillic script representing two Common Slavonic nasal vowels in the early Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets. Each can occur in iotated form (Ѩ, Ѭ), formed as ligatures with the decimal i (І). Other yus letters are closed little yus (Ꙙ), iotated closed little yus (Ꙝ) and blended yus (Ꙛ).

Phonetically, little yus represents a nasalized front vowel, possibly [ɛ̃] (like the French ‘in’ in “cinq” or Polish 'ę' in “kęs”), while big yus represents a nasalized back vowel, such as IPA [ɔ̃] (like the French ‘on’ in “bombon” or Polish 'ą' in “kąt”). This is also suggested by the appearance of each as a 'stacked' digraph of 'Am' and 'Om' respectively.

The Ser-Drama-Lagadin-Nevrokop dialect is a dialect currently treated both in the contexts of the southeastern group of Bulgarian dialects and the southeastern subgroup of dialects of the Macedonian.Prior to the codification of standard Macedonian in 1945, the dialects of Macedonia were classified as Bulgarian.The dialect is dynamic and is well known for the shortening of the words, and also characterised by the excessive use of /ʲa/ for the Proto-Slavic yat even in cases where standard Bulgarian has /ɛ/, a feature which is typical for a number of dialects spoken in southern and southwestern Bulgaria (e.g. the Thracian dialect).The Ser-Drama-Lagadin-Nevrokop dialect is closely related to the neighbouring dialects. It is closer to all Eastern Bulgarian dialects than to all Western. Macedonian shares much less features with the dialect than it does with the Maleševo-Pirin dialect of Macedonian and Bulgarian. Some Bulgarian dialects are more similar to Macedonian than the Ser-Nevrokop dialect, the Samokov dialect shares more features with Macedonian than both the Ser-Nevrokop and the Pirin-Malasevo dialects do, even though it is not considered a Macedonian dialect, most of the western Bulgarian dialects and the Smolyan dialect share more similarities with Macedonian than the Ser dialect does. The Samokov dialect, most remarkably, shares with Macedonian and the Maleševo-Pirin dialect—the "to be" verb for future tense—"ke", which in contrast is "shte" in the Ser-Nevrokop dialect and in the Bulgarian language. The Yat border passes through the Maleševo-Pirin dialect and divides it on such a way that in the northern area of the dialect the yat is pronounced "e" (as in all the Western Bulgarian dialects and Macedonian) and in the south—"ya" (as in the Eastern Bulgarian dialects and standard Bulgarian). In the Ser-Nevrokop dialect the yat is pronounced in most places "ya", therefore the city of Serres, after which the dialect is named, is called "Syar" by the locals, as opposed to "Ser" in Macedonian. The first person singular is as in Bulgarian, ending with "a" or "am" as opposed to the constant "am" in Macedonian and the Bulgarian Smolyan dialect. The words for man -"m'zh" and for a dream "s'n" are as in Bulgarian, unlike the Macedonian "mazh" and "son". The words for night and tear—"nosht" and "s'lza" are as the Bulgarian, unlike the Macedonian "nok" and "solza".

The Serres-Nevrokop dialect is treated both in the contexts of Bulgarian and Macedonian dialectology. As described in the section about its range, the vast majority of its speakers identify as Bulgarians. In the context of Bulgarian dialectology, the dialect is situated East of the Yat boundary and thus is considered to belong to the Eastern Bulgarian dialects, more exactly to the Rup subgroup

The ruki sound law, also known as the ruki rule or iurk rule, is a historical sound change that took place in the satem branches of the Indo-European language family, namely in Balto-Slavic, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian. According to this sound law, an original *s changed to *š (a sound similar to English ⟨sh⟩) after the consonants *r, *k, *g, *gʰ and the semi-vowels *w (*u̯) and *y (*i̯), as well as the syllabic allophones *r̥, *i, and *u:

Specifically, the initial stage involves the retraction of the coronal sibilant *s after semi-vowels, *r, or a velar consonant *k, *g or *gʰ. In the second stage, leveling of the sibilant system resulted in retroflexion (cf. Sanskrit ष *[ʂ] and Proto-Slavic), and later retraction to velar *x in Slavic and some Middle Indic languages. This rule was first formulated by Holger Pedersen, and it is sometimes known as Pedersen's law, although this term is also applied to another sound law concerning stress in the Balto-Slavic languages.

The Slavic first palatalization is a Proto-Slavic sound change that manifested as regressive palatalization of inherited Balto-Slavic velar consonants.

The Slavic second palatalization is a Proto-Slavic sound change that manifested as a regressive palatalization of inherited Balto-Slavic velar consonants that occurred after the first and before the third Slavic palatalizations.