Sussex R., Cubberley P. The Slavic Languages
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of the thirties and the post-war years destroyed much of the Belarusian cultural
leadership and intelligentsia as part of the attack on ‘‘bourgeois nationalism’’. This
repressive policy had the effect of sending the Belarusian language and literature
into a period of retreat for almost twenty years.
Belarusian might have continued to decline had it not been for the fall of
Communism and the USSR, since the use of Russian had become so widespread
in Belarus. The consolidation and completed codification of the language will
certainly reinforce its status (11.2). But President Lukashenko (Bel Lukas
ˇ
enka)is
moving to strengthen economic, cultural and linguistic ties with Russia, which will
tend to restrict the overall vitality of the Belarusian language.
2.4 West Slavic
The West Slavs consist of two principal ethnic and linguistic groups: a Czecho-
Slovak group, comprising Czech and Slovak; and a Lekhitic group, including
Polish, Kashubian, Upper Sorbian, Lower Sorbian (though this classification of
Lower Sorbian is sometimes disputed: see 2.4.2) and the extinct languages:
Polabian, a language which became extinct in the eighteenth century in what is
now Germany; and Slovincian, which disappeared in Northern Poland in the early
twentieth century.
The most potent religious force in the history of the West Slavic languages has
been Catholicism, which drove Orthodoxy out of Moravia in the ninth century,
triumphed over the Reformation, and made some important inroads into
Orthodox strongholds in Ukraine and Belarus. The Catholic Church provided
the alphabet, a literary tradition, and administrative and educational structures,
which all played a vital role in the establishment of the West Slavic literary
languages. The church’s role was often linked to political agendas and to
German – and Hungarian – national aspirations. The German influence was
responsible for expelling Orthodoxy from the Western Slavic lands, and for
suppressing the use of Czech in the former Bohemian Kingdom during the
Counter-Reformation. German has also been the dominant influence in politics,
culture and economics for a thousand years. After 1945 the West Slavs were turned
eastwards away from Germany towards the new hegemony of Russia, from which
they emerged on the fall of Euro-Communism in 1991.
The West Slavic languages have been characterized by a strong sense of ethnicity.
For the East Slavs, linguistic nationhood was concerned with crystallizing intra-
Slavic differences into cultural and political units. But for the West Slavs it was a
matter of survival, self-determination and self-definition in the face of intermittent
repression, especially from the Germans and Hungarians. Czech and Polish were
2.4 West Slavic 89
fortunate in emerging early as language-cultures. And if Slovak lacked such an
obvious historical tradition, it was at least born in a spirit of nineteenth-century
nationalism which gave a solid impetus to differentiating it from the cultural massif
of Czech. Sorbian, with a much smaller population and many fewer advantages,
has had the hardest struggle to survive. But the German influence has not been
consistently antagonistic to the West Slavs. Much of the economic and political,
and a good part of the cultural (especially musical), heritage of the West Slavs has
derived inspiration from the Germans and Austrians.
2.4.1 Polish
The Polish language has been maintained for more than a millennium by virtue of
numbers, historical self-awareness, ethnic loyalty and religious cohesion. The
strong and continuous affiliation with Catholicism helped to spare Polish much
of the linguistic trauma of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which
played such an important role in the history of Czech. Of all the West Slavic
languages, Polish was the least likely to perish. What Polish required was a
permanent political framework, particularly after the restrictions on the use of
Polish in public life during the partitions of Poland from 1797 to 1918. As Schenker
observes: ‘Polish, alone among the Slavic literary languages, has gone through a
gradual, unbroken development from the Middle Ages to the present day’
(Schenker, 1980: 210).
The origins of the Polish State, like those of Bohemia and Moravia, are uncertain.
We know that the Poles – the name originally meant ‘plain-dwellers’ – occupied the
area between the Oder and the Vistula about the sixth century
AD, and were
constantly harried by the Germans from the west. In 963 Prince Mieszko finally
scored an important victory over the Germans, and brought about the
Christianization of Poland in 966 as a result of his subsequent marriage to a
Bohemian princess. Kazimierz the Great (r. 1333–1370), the last of the Piast
dynasty, established Poland as a viable political entity. He promoted Poland’s
external security by making peace with Bohemia and the Teutonic Knights, and
expanding Poland’s boundaries eastwards into the west of the Kievan state. His
internal policies included fiscal and legal reform, human rights, religious tolerance,
and the promotion of communications, architecture and the arts. His achievements
included the founding of the Cracow (Pol Krako
´
w) Academy, later the University
of Cracow, in 1364. And the Christianization of Lithuania (1386) spread Polish
language and influence through all its eastern provinces. This period also saw the
start of the fusion of language elements from the original court around Poznan
´
and
Gniezno in western Poland (Pol Wielkopolska, or ‘Great Poland’), with elements
90 2. Socio-historical evolution
from the ‘‘Little Poland’’ (Pol Małopolska) area around Cracow in the south,
culminating in the establishment of the capital in Warsaw (Pol Warszawa), which
belongs to the Mazovian dialect area of Poland (10.4.2).
During the early period of Christian rule in Poland the official language was
Latin, though there is a possible echo of the Constantine and Methodius tradition
in the ancient hymn Bogurodzica (‘Mother of God’). Polish proper names appear in
Latin manuscripts from the twelfth century, some early glosses from the thirteenth
century, and psalters and sermons from the fourteenth century, together with some
records of local government. The beginnings of a more literary tradition are found
in satirical and didactic verse in the fifteenth century. Knowledge of Latin, how-
ever, was restricted to the clergy and the upper classes. The language of the court at
Gniezno and later at Cracow was evolving in a European context, as can be seen
from numerous borrowings from Old Czech, German, Latin, Italian and other
languages. The secular use of Polish received an indirect but important stimulus
from the insistence of Kazimierz the Great on law and education. From the
fifteenth century we find an increasing number of translations, as well as legal
and court documents, in Polish. In the Polish Golden Age in the sixteenth century
the humanism of the High Renaissance and the Reformation brought Polish
culture to a genuinely European level. The spirit of Polish self-awareness was
expressed in the famous proclamation by Rey (1505–1569):
A niechaj narodowie w
_
zdy, postronni znaja˛
I
_
z Polacy nie ge˛si,
_
ze swo
´
jje˛zyk maja˛ .
And may other nations always know
That the Poles are not geese, and have their own language.
The sixteenth century also marks the summit of Poland’s power in political and
military terms. Poland ‘‘semper fidelis’’ was the bulwark of Catholic Europe.
The strength of the Catholic Church reflected the political stability of Poland:
the country benefited enormously from the cultural and linguistic stimulus of the
Reformation, without being influenced by Protestantism to a major degree, and
was largely spared the Counter-Reformation. The Poles had already achieved a
wider use of their language in public affairs, and a certain democratization of the
church while maintaining their links with Rome. Sermons were already regularly
delivered in Polish, and the secular use of the language had been firmly established
through the encouragement of literacy and printing in the Golden Age.
The Jagiellonian dynasty (1370–1572) saw the rise of Poland to the status of a
European power, which eventually stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
Polish cultural, religious and linguistic influence, partly as a result of the Union
of Lublin of 1569, extended eastwards into Lithuania, Belorussia and Ukraine. But
2.4 West Slavic 91
the elective monarchy which followed it (1572–1795) ended in Poland’s disappear-
ance as a political entity. Poland’s political decline was not accompanied by a
cultural collapse, as happened in Czechoslovakia. But the eventual partitioning of
Poland by Russia, Prussia and Austria in 1772 and 1773, and its total dismember-
ment in 1795–1797, did pose a genuine threat to the continuation of Polish
language-culture. The Poles, unlike the Czechs after the disaster of the Battle of
White Mountain in 1620, developed a spirit of Romantic nationalism.
The resilience of the Polish language in partitioned Poland – as championed in
the nineteenth century by poets like Mickiewicz – became one of the symbols of
Polish nationalism. The three occupying powers were not equally tolerant of the
cultivation of the Polish language. The Austrians were at least Catholic, and so had
no religious quarrel with the Poles. Their administration was culturally permissive
in its attitude towards the use of Polish. Prussia was initially more concerned with
the Germanization of the lands west of the Lower Vistula, and with the economic
utilization of Polish production. In the nineteenth century, however, the old fric-
tion between Catholicism and the Lutheranism of Prussia began to re-emerge, and
under Bismarck the policy of Kulturkampf was directed towards the systematic
de-Polonization of key areas like education. But it was in the Russian-occupied
zones that Polish fared worst. Ancient rivalries for control of Belorussia and
Ukraine, and between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, found expression in a strongly
anti-Polish attitude by the Russian administration. After the 1863–1864 uprising
the Russian administration forbade the use of Polish in public places, including
churches, and in education.
Education was probably the most sensitive area. The use of Polish language and
literature in education was actively supported by the church, but Prussia and
Russia restricted its use. All over partitioned Poland education was at a low
ebb, with small numbers of ill-equipped schools. The study of German or
Russian was made obligatory, and secondary and tertiary education was biased
increasingly towards the languages of the occupying powers. The Russians closed
the University of Wilno in 1831 – in contrast to the Austrians, who permitted the
continuation of the Polish Academy in Cracow. The situation with literature was
equally difficult. Polish literature answered the difficulties of the Partitions by
going into partial exile. Paris became the home of generations of Polish writers,
musicians and artists. The French influence had been strong in Polish political and
artistic life since the end of the eighteenth century, particularly since the
Napoleonic Wars, and there are important links between French Jacobinism and
the Republican and nationalistic-Romantic sentiments which sustained the Polish
cause through the Partitions, and eventually emerged in independent Poland in
1918. Writers like Mickiewicz, Słowacki, Norwid, Krasin
´
ski, Prus,
_
Zeromski, and
92 2. Socio-historical evolution
the Nobel laureates Reymont and Sienkiewicz, all spent important periods of their
creative lives abroad – as did the composer Chopin (Pol Szopen) – and published
much of their work outside Poland.
After 1918 the fate of the Polish language in the reconstituted Polish state was no
longer endangered. But there were significant linguistic problems in the new state
which were never solved, particularly the fate of the millions of Ukrainians,
Belarusians and Germans, who were systematically disadvantaged in education
and ethnic rights. Nowadays most of the East European Poles live within Poland.
But there are still millions of Poles and their descendants living overseas. Some of
these migrations date from the late nineteenth century and the large-scale exodus of
Poles, especially from the impoverished Galician area in the east. There are also
substantial groups of Poles who left Poland more recently for ethnic and political
reasons, and now live in North America, Britain, Western Europe and Australasia.
The effect of the end of Communism has been less dramatic in Poland than in
most other Slavic countries. While there are significant lexical and stylistic changes
under way as a result of cultural Westernization, the status of the Polish language in
Poland has hardly altered. Rapprochement with the West was already well under
way before 1990, and Polish influence – through the work of the trade union
Solidarity (Pol Solidarnos
´
c
´
) and the enormous strategic importance of the presence
of the Polish Pope, John Paul II, in the Vatican – were among the key factors
leading to the post-Communist era.
2.4.2 Sorbian (Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian)
The Sorbs represent the smallest officially recognized modern Slavic language(s).
During the last hundred years they have declined from 166,000 to probably at most
67,000 speakers (Stone, 1985), and possibly under 30,000. Speakers of Upper
Sorbian outnumber speakers of Lower Sorbian by 2 : 1. Half the Sorbs are
Lutheran and a quarter Catholic. Culturally and ethnically distinct from the
Poles and Czechs, their nearest Slavic neighbours, they have managed to preserve
their language and identity through long periods of Germanization since the tenth
century. Since the disappearance of the Polabian language on the lower Elbe in the
eighteenth century, the Sorbs have been the last of the Slavs who reached the
territory bordered by the Elbe and the Oder some time between the third and
sixth centuries
AD. They inhabit an area around the River Spree (Sorb Sprjewja)to
the east of Berlin and Dresden, and west of the Oder–Neisse rivers, barely
90 km 65 km in extent. This area is known as Lusatia (Ger Lausitz,SorbŁuzˇica),
hence the alternative, now less common, English name of the language and people:
Lusatian(s) (e.g. de Bray, 1980c). The Sorbs are traditionally an agricultural
2.4 West Slavic 93
people, and Sorbian has never become a dominant urban language. Even the
capital, Bautzen (Sorb Budys
ˇ
in), has only 1,000 Sorbs out of a population of
44,000 (Stone, 1972: 3). Bautzen is the focal point of the Upper Sorbs, who inhabit
the southern (upper) reaches of the River Spree. The less numerous Lower Sorbs
are centred further to the north, around the town of Cottbus (Sorb Chos
´
ebuz).
Until 1991 the Sorbs constituted an official ethnic minority in what used to be the
German Democratic Republic. This status was ratified in the 1990 treaty of the
reunification of the Germanies. The replacement in 1992 of the Institut za Serbski
Ljudospyt (Institute for Serbian Ethnography) with the Serbski Institut in Bautzen,
with a branch in Cottbus for Lower Sorbian, gives Sorbian a permanent institu-
tional home.
The Sorbs have a long history of subjugation. They have passed through periods
of Polish, Czech and especially German (Prussian and Saxon) domination, when
they often had little or no official civil, legal or ethnic standing. Like most of the
other oppressed Slavic peoples, the Sorbs benefited linguistically from the
Reformation, which introduced Sorbian into liturgical use and, with its translations
of the Bible in both Lower and Upper Sorbian, in that order, dating from the
sixteenth century, prompted the beginnings of Sorbian written culture.
Lutheranism in both Upper and Lower Sorbian, and Catholicism in Upper
Sorbian, both provided stimuli to the development of written Sorbian, a situation
which was not helped by periodic suppression of printing in Sorbian. Grammars and
dictionaries of both variants of Sorbian appeared during the following century.
During the Romantic movements of the early nineteenth century Sorbian began to
flourish as a written language, and enjoyed a fine flowering of journalism and
literature, especially in the poets Zejler and Bart-C
ˇ
is
ˇ
inski. The cultural organization
Mac
´
ica Srbska (Herrity, 1973), founded in 1847, provided a focus-point for the new
Sorbian literature. These movements were rebuffed by the pan-German policies of
the late nineteenth century. This continued until the Sorbs were finally recognized as
an ethnic entity after the Second World War, when, in the terms of the Constitution
of the German Democratic Republic, Sorbian achieved the status of an official
language, and its people gained education rights extending from primary school to
tertiary studies at the Sorbian Institute of the Karl Marx University in Leipzig.
Significantly, however, the Constitution of the German Democratic Republic
recognized only a single ‘‘Sorbian’’ language – like the ‘‘Czechoslovak’’ language in
Czechoslovakia between the two World Wars (2.4.5–6) – so that the Upper and
Lower versions were regarded at most as variants, and not as two languages.
The uncertain status of Sorbian as one language or two is reflected in the history
of its standardization. Early Bible translations, grammars and dictionaries were in
both Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian. At this stage the literary language was
94 2. Socio-historical evolution
predominantly ecclesiastical, and its variety mirrored the religious diversity which
followed the Reformation. We find in the eighteenth century three standardized
Sorbian languages – Catholic Upper Sorbian (strongly supported from Prague),
and Protestant Upper and Lower Sorbian. This situation was eventually resolved
by the merging of the two Upper Sorbian variants, but only recently:
The closure of [the newspaper] Serbske Nowiny in 1937 marked the end
of the era in which Catholic and Protestant Sorbs in Upper Lusatia had
each had their own literary language. After the revival of publishing in
1945 all Upper Sorbs used the analogical spelling, but wrote in what
was basically the Protestant literary variant.
(Stone, 1972: 121)
The establishment of Sorbian as a literary language in the nineteenth century
depended very much – as in Macedonia, Slovenia and Slovakia – on closer links
between the literary and spoken language. Mac
´
ica Serbska, and newspapers like
Tydz
´
enska Nowina and Serbske Nowiny, provided an outlet for the new literature,
and for an increasingly de-Germanized form of Sorbian. And in the twentieth
century Domowina (1912–), a publishing house and cultural focal-point, has
played the primary role in encouraging publication in Sorbian. In spite of this,
the two standard literary variants of Sorbian have remained, as is the case with
Czech, at some distance from the spoken language. Although the Gothic alphabet
was finally abandoned – by the Catholic Sorbian press in 1910, and the Protestant
Sorbian press in 1937 – and the Roman alphabet adopted, attempts at unifying the
two languages have been resisted by popular feeling, especially on the part of
Lower Sorbs.
It is difficult to gauge the likely effect on Sorbian of the demise of the German
Democratic Republic, and the consolidation of East and West Germany. The
change will bring Sorbian within the protection of language rights in the
European Community, which could certainly help to support the maintenance of
the language at an official level. It remains to be seen whether Upper, and particu-
larly Lower, Sorbian are sufficiently vigorous to benefit from this new situation.
There is still the vexed question of whether the two Sorbians constitute one
language or two, and even whether they derive from the same source (Polan
´
ski,
1980). Linguists, and especially philologists, cannot even agree on whether Sorbian
constitutes two languages covering two different peoples (Schuster-S
ˇ
ewc, 1959),
two standard languages emerging from a single proto-language but covering one
people (Lo
¨
tsch, 1963), or two variants of a single language. Schleicher (1871)
located Sorbian within the Czech-Slovak group, while Taszycki (1928) and
Stieber (1930) have Sorbian with the Lekhitic grouping of Polish and Kashubian,
together with the dead languages Polabian and Slovincian, and explain the
2.4 West Slavic 95
similarities between especially Upper Sorbian and Czech on the grounds of later
contiguous development and influence. There is no obvious way of resolving this
difference of opinion. In sociolinguistic terms, both Upper and Lower Sorbs refer to
themselves as Serbja. Upper Sorbian is stronger than Lower Sorbian as an official,
standardized literary language. As Stone notes (1993a: 599), ‘Lower Sorbian has
only with great difficulty maintained its separate status as a literary language’.
Although it exists in a standard literary form, Lower Sorbian is certainly not as
‘‘vital’’, in the sociolinguistic sense that it is much less used than Upper Sorbian in
printed form, has fewer speakers, and is restricted in the social and functional roles
that it fulfills, which suggests that it is less than a full language. On the other hand,
the degree of differentiation of Lower Sorbian from Upper Sorbian is somewhat
greater than the distance between Kashubian and Polish, which favors the analysis
of two languages rather than one. Nonetheless, various aspects of language policy
and management in the Lower Sorbian written language over the last century have
tended to move it towards written Upper Sorbian (Stone, 1985). These include the
1891 grammar of Lower Sorbian by Muka (Mucke, 1965), and that by S
ˇ
w´ ela of
1906, favoring the Upper Sorbian rule of the genitive-accusative for masculine
personal nouns in the plural over the nominative-accusative (6.2.4), although the
genitive-accusative is found in no Lower Sorbian dialect. Similarly, the mainten-
ance of the simple imperfect and aorist past tenses in written Lower Sorbian follow
the model of Upper Sorbian with no justification in the Lower Sorbian dialects.
And in orthography Lower Sorbian has abandoned prothetic written /h/ before /o/
and /u/ in favor of the Upper Sorbian prothetic /w/ (1.3.1.7, 3.2.1.4).
The decision on whether we are dealing with one language or two depends – as it
does with Croatian and Serbian – on which set of criteria is considered to be
decisive, since the standard criteria for describing language-hood do not resolve
this dilemma (11.2). However, a promising new model for the interpretation of the
relation between the two variants of Sorbian is offered by the concept of ‘‘pluri-
centric languages’’ (Kloss, 1967; Clyne, 1991, 1991a–b; Sussex 1994). Pluricentric
languages, which include English and German, have multiple standards in different
locations. The variant forms (for instance, British, American and Australian
English) need not be equally influential, but they do have recognized norms,
unify recognized groups of speakers, and may encompass linguistic variation of
quite substantial scope. Just as there are proponents of an American language
(Mencken, 1919/1936), so also one can speak of two separate Sorbian languages, or
of a single pluricentric language, or of a single language with a major sub-variant in
Lower Sorbian.
We shall follow de Bray (1980c), S
ˇ
irokova and Gudkov (1977) and others who
concentrate on Upper Sorbian as the more prominent variant, referring to Lower
96 2. Socio-historical evolution
Sorbian particularly in relation to phonology and morphology as a well defined
co-variant, and clearly more than a dialect.
2.4.3 Kashubian and Slovincian
Kashubian (or ‘‘Cassubian’’) belongs to the Lekhitic group of West Slavic, stretch-
ing from the now extinct Polabian in the west, through Slovincian and Kashubian
to Polish in the east. The term ‘‘Pomeranian’’ covers Kashubian and the dialects
which were once spoken to its west, notably Slovincian.
According to Ethnologue, Kashubian is spoken by perhaps only 3,000 people in
the north-west of Poland around the city of Gdan
´
sk, though up to 500,000 may
claim Kashubian ethnicity while speaking Polish. Compared to Slovincian and
Polabian, it shows relatively lower levels of Germanization. It has also remained
distinct from standard Polish. All in all, Kashubian is a difficult but intriguing case.
As Topolin
´
ska (1980: 194) shows, its main claim to the status of a literary language
is a ‘more or less strictly codified spelling standard’, though Lorentz’s (1919)
attempt at establishing this standard was not fully successful. Kashubian still
lacks a well-documented standardized form. There is a varied Kashubian liter-
ature, including writing of significant scope in the nineteenth century. But it reflects
the usage of the Kashubian intelligentsia, and is not the agreed codified standard of
the Kashubians. As a group, the Kashubians lack a sense of ethnic identity and
separatism, and do not make the strong connection between ethnicity and national
language which we find among all the other Slavic languages. The use of
Kashubian is restricted on the whole to non-official contexts, and mainly to
domestic and local situations. The presence of Polish, a closely related language
used for all official purposes, creates a diglossic situation in which the status of
Kashubian is subsidiary, and does not seem likely to improve. This situation partly
recalls the relation of Belarusian to Russian before 1990. But the difference is that
Belarusian has significantly greater numbers, and a well-defined standard lan-
guage, both of which are missing in Kashubian. The Kashubians themselves refer
to Polish as ‘‘high speech’’, on the analogy of Hochdeutsch and Plattdeutsch
(Topolin
´
ska 1980: 184). For this reason, we shall treat Kashubian as both less
than a language and more than a standard Polish dialect, particularly since
Kashubian is not as readily understood by other speakers of Polish.
Slovincian, which became extinct early in the twentieth century, is most often
considered as a western variant of Kashubian. It was spoken on the Baltic, between
Polabian in the west and Kashubian in the east. Slovincian did not attain the status
of more than a local variant, though the fact that it has a distinct name serves
to identify it, and its Protestant speakers, as something more than just a dialect.
2.4 West Slavic 97
We shall refer occasionally to Slovincian examples, but shall not devote major
attention to it.
2.4.4 Polabian
Polabian, once spoken near the mouth of the River Elbe on the Baltic, is the
westernmost of the former Baltic Slavic languages, and part of the Lekhitic family
together with Polish. The Polabians were descendants of the Drevani, a Slavic
tribe whose presence is recorded from the eleventh century. Polabian became
extinct in the middle of the eighteenth century, and is only imperfectly known
from proper names and records of the language taken down before its disappearance
(Polan
´
ski, 1993).
The 2,800 or so words which constitute our lexical knowledge of Polabian show
up to 20 percent German interference. The grammar of the language was also
significantly Germanized. Polabian is formally of considerable historical and
typological interest, but too little is known of its history and social development.
2.4.5 Czech
The area which is now the Czech and Slovak Republics was occupied by the Slavs
only in the sixth century
AD. Before this time the country had been successively
populated by the Celtic Boii (hence ‘‘Bohemia’’) until 100
BC, and then sporadically
by German tribes. The Slavs, led by the mythical hero C
ˇ
ech (hence ‘‘Czech’’ –
though spelled in Polish-style orthography), lived in a region dominated by the
Avars. Under the leadership of an outsider, Samo, they achieved independence
from the Avars in the seventh century. In the ninth century there was established
the state of Great Moravia, a kingdom which included Bohemia and parts of
modern Slovakia, Poland and Hungary. Its Prince Rostislav was responsible for
introducing (Orthodox) Christianity to the region when he invited the Byzantine
Patriarch to send missionaries to convert the Western Slavs. Constantine and
Methodius (2.2.1) arrived in 863, and converted and baptized the Slavs of
Moravia and Bohemia. They brought with them the Orthodox Church’s adminis-
trative structures, an alphabet and the beginnings of a literary language and culture
modelled on Greek (that is, Old Church Slavonic). The Catholic German princes
were suspicious of this movement. They conspired to overthrow Rostislav (870),
and, with the deaths of Constantine (869) and Methodius (885), Orthodoxy came
to a premature end among the West Slavs. The Slavic books and liturgy were
burned and proscribed, and German-dominated Catholicism replaced them.
Moravia fell to the Hungarians about 900, and the young Slavic culture was driven
98 2. Socio-historical evolution