Sussex R., Cubberley P. The Slavic Languages
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language. There is also a universal turning-away from Russian influences, which
have been dominant in lexis and style in political and economic language, in favor
of western European and indigenous models. The break-up of the Eastern
European block, while certain to have no underlying effect on the genetic cohesion
of Slavic, may well lead, in a more superficial and less systematic way, to a certain
emphasis on nationally distinctive characteristics, and an increase in variety
between the languages.
Such issues, together with the historical events within which they belong, form
the socio-cultural history of the Slavic languages, which is the topic of chapter 2.
1.8 Overview 59
2
Socio-historical evolution
2.1 The socio-historical context
The traditional classification of Slavic into West, East and South results not in
three wholly distinct groups, but rather in three overlapping clusters of linguistic,
religious, ethnic and cultural features (Birnbaum, 1966).
The South Slavs are less homogeneous. The Slovenes and Croats, as a result of
their Catholic faith, use the Roman script, and have had long-standing traditional
ties with the Austro-Hungarian empire. The Serbs and Macedonians, together with
the Bulgarians, have been allied with the Orthodox Church and use the Cyrillic
script. There are also considerable numbers of Muslims in former Yugoslavia,
especially in Bosnia and Kosovo. The South Slavs have Albanian and Greek to
the south, Turkish to the south-east and Italian to the west, and are separated
geographically and linguistically from the West and East Slavs by a belt of
Germanic (German), Romance (Romanian) and Finno-Ugrian (Hungarian)
languages. This underlying religious–cultural diversity has contributed to the
long history of instability in the Balkans.
The East Slavic languages have traditionally been mainly Orthodox in religious
orientation, and use the Cyrillic script. Their cultural focus has been within
European Russia, first in Kiev, and later in Moscow and St. Petersburg. They
coexist with a considerable number of non-Slavic (e.g. Baltic), and also non-
Indo-European, languages, both within European Russia and Ukraine, and
especially in Asia, as a result of the colonial expansion of Imperial Russia to the
east and south, notably in the nineteenth century (Comrie, 1981).
In contrast, the West Slavs have consistently been largely Catholic or Protestant.
They use the Roman script and, like the South Slavs, were included in the
Communist Eastern Bloc only after the Second World War. The West Slavs have
had direct contact with East Slavic (Belarusian, Ukrainian) and Baltic (Lithuanian
and the extinct Old Prussian) in the east and north, with German in the west and
south, and with Hungarian in the south-east.
60
Most of the Slavic languages and cultures are now in a stronger position than in
the past. Since about the eighth century AD the Slavs have had a growing influence
in Europe and Asia, and more recently on the transported European cultures of
the Americas and Australasia. Until the collapse of European Communism in
1989–1991, Russian in particular enjoyed a period of wide influence, not only as
the main language of administration, politics, learning and the arts in Imperial
Russia and then in the USSR, but also as an important linguistic, political and
cultural force in Eastern Europe as well as on the international scene.
The Slavs refer to their standard languages as ‘‘literary languages’’, and regard
them as bearers of their cultural traditions, closely bound up with their national
and ethnic identity. The survival and establishment of the Slavs, their languages
and their cultures, constitute the ‘‘external’’ history of the Slavic languages
(Bidwell, 1970). We shall consider the languages individually, in order to establish
the characteristics of each in terms of their social and cultural history. The order
South Slavic–East Slavic–West Slavic roughly follows the chronology of major
cultural development. We shall then survey the key features of this evolution in a
cross-language perspective (2.5).
2.1.1 The external history of the Slavic languages
The ‘‘external’’ history of a language begins with factors of physical geography.
The flat lands of Poland and European Russia facilitate migration or invasion,
while inaccessible mountainous country can provide refuge, as in Slovenia and
Montenegro in the former Yugoslavia. Equally important is political geography,
as in the periods of Slavic history when the languages have been subject either to
occupation by foreign powers or to pressures of political, cultural or religious
conformity. In the Slavic world language has a particularly intimate link with the
ethnic concept of nation (‘‘natio’’) and the geographical–political notion of home-
land (‘‘patria’’: Walicki, 1982). Religion has also played a major role, both in terms
of faith and as spiritual politics, either Christian vs non-Christian, or Catholic vs
Orthodox, or Catholic vs Protestant. Here again the fusion of language and nation-
alism is often crucial, as we find in Reformation Czechoslovakia and Slovenia. Other
‘‘external’’ factors which have influenced the evolution of the Slavic languages are
more generally found in other language groups, and include social stability, military
security, material prosperity, historical self-confidence and self-awareness, continu-
ous historical continuity (‘‘historicity’’), ethnicity and national consciousness (11.2).
All three major Slavic language groups enjoyed an early period of power and
prosperity – for example, during the flowering of the empires of Bulgaria and
Serbia in the south, Kiev in the east, and Bohemia and Poland–Lithuania in the
2.1 The socio-historical context 61
west. They all subsequently underwent invasion, occupation and foreign domina-
tion from the early Middle Ages: by the Tartars in the east, the Ottoman Turks in
the south, and the Hapsburgs and Germanic states, together with the Russians, in
the West Slavic area. Some languages, like Polabian and Slovincian, died out.
Some, like Macedonian and Bosnian, have only recently achieved official status,
while other varieties, like Kashubian and Montenegrin, still lack that standing.
Unlike the Germans, the Slavs have tended to move towards a multiplicity of
languages, and of political and ethnic groupings:
The Germanic group has been throughout history increasingly homo-
geneous, and the Slavic group in some measure increasingly hetero-
geneous. The tendency of German history has been towards
consolidation – the concept of Grossdeutschtum has dominated
directly or indirectly almost all Germanic political thought. The ten-
dency of Slavic history on the other hand, in spite of sporadic efforts
towards Pan-Slavism, has been in the direction of the formation of
distinct branches of the larger group.
(Thomson, 1953: 131)
2.2 South Slavic
The modern South Slavic languages comprise two major sub-groups: North-west
South Slavic, consisting of Slovenian and B/C/S (Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian);
and South-east South Slavic, comprising Bulgarian and Macedonian. The Slavic
countries occupy an area bounded by the Adriatic in the west; the Black Sea in the
east; Italy, Austria, Hungary and Romania in the North; and Albania, Greece and
Turkey in the south. Slavic-speaking minorities are found in some of these adjacent
non-Slavic countries (0.4, 11.6). All these languages except Bulgarian were part of
the People’s Republic of Yugoslavia until its recent disintegration, and are now
located in independent states.
The history of the South Slavic languages has been fundamentally shaped by
religious, mercantile and military conflicts. In comparison with the East and West
Slavs, the South Slavs have had to survive more foreign masters, more ideological
conflicts, more fluid political boundaries and more ethnic diversity. In place of
the Catholic vs Protestant conflict of the West Slavs, or the Catholic vs Orthodox
confrontation among the East Slavs, the South Slavs have had Catholicism,
Orthodoxy and Islam. Foreign masters, including the Turks, Germans,
Hungarians and Italians, have retarded the development of Slavic ethnic identity
and culture. This underlying heterogeneous character of the South Slavic states
remains to the present day.
62 2. Socio-historical evolution
The early history of the Balkans is known from Greek and Roman historians.
The Balkan Peninsula passed from the Hellenic to the Roman sphere of influence
about the third century BC, and remained under Roman control until the break-up
of the Roman empire in the fifth century
AD. By this time the Balkan area was
Christian, but not Slavic. Its ethnic composition was hybrid, and it was only in the
fifth century that the disintegration of the Roman empire contributed, directly or
indirectly, to the arrival of the Slavs in the Balkans. The Slavs were known as the
Antae or Wends. About the seventh century they may have been driven southwards
from the Slavic homeland by the Avars, who also pillaged the Balkans from their
base in the Danube Basin. The Slavs were pagan. The Balkans, after their arrival,
were lost for Christianity from the sixth to the ninth centuries. But, unlike the other
raiders, the Slavs were settlers, and by 750 they had spread through former
Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Greece. The indigenous populations were assimilated
progressively and apparently fairly peacefully.
While Bulgaria and Bulgarian have a clearer identity, the history of the
languages of former Yugoslavia ( jug- ¼ ‘south’; Jugoslavia ¼ ‘south Slavdom’) is
very diverse. Macedonian (2.2.3) and Slovenian (2.2.5) are independent languages,
with some complications vis-a
`
-vis Bulgarian in the case of Macedonian. The other
Slavs in the Serbian–Croatian area of former Yugoslavia fall into three main
groups: Catholic Croatia and Dalmatia, where the Roman alphabet is used;
Orthodox Serbia and Montenegro, as well as Republika Srpska, which use the
Cyrillic alphabet; and Bosnia-Hercegovina, now Roman-script, where there are
substantial numbers of Muslims in addition to Orthodox (Serbian) and Catholic
(Croat) Christians. The religious and ethnic diversity of these groups has played an
important role in the development of their languages. For much of their existence
these languages have not had official national status. This is why political guaran-
tees of the languages’ standing and security have been so important, and why lan-
guage policy and language rights play such a vital role among the Adriatic Slavs.
We address Old Church Slavonic first, with its historical origins and continua-
tion in Bulgarian and Macedonian; then the three components of B/C/S, divided by
religion and history; and finally Slovenian, which stands substantially apart from
the other South Slav languages in terms of history until the establishment of
Yugoslavia in 1945.
2.2.1 Old Church Slavonic and Church Slavonic
Old Church Slavonic (‘‘OCS’’) is a special case among the Slavic languages. It is not
identified with any one nation, and in modern times is largely a dead language,
except in conservative ecclesiastical use. On the other hand, it played a pivotal role
2.2 South Slavic 63
in the formation of the Slavic literary languages, particularly in the Orthodox
world, and to a lesser extent in the development of Croatian. Old Church
Slavonic has a supra-national character among the Orthodox Slavs.
The terms ‘‘Old Church Slavonic’’ and ‘‘Church Slavonic’’ (‘‘ChSl’’) themselves
present problems of usage. They are sometimes used interchangeably, which obscures
several important factors. Old Church Slavonic was created in the ninth century as a
religious language. It was based on the South Slavic of the Bulgarian–Macedonian
area, though Old Church Slavonic would have been intelligible throughout the Slavic
world at this time. It is not certain who ‘‘created’’ Old Church Slavonic, though credit
is commonly given to Constantine (later St. Cyril) and Methodius, the two monks
who converted the Slavs of Moravia to Orthodoxy in 863 (2.4.5). When Orthodoxy
was expelled from Moravia in 870 the focus of the Orthodox movement moved to
Bulgaria (Preslav) and Macedonia (Ohrid). At the end of the ninth century Old
Church Slavonic was written in two distinct scripts, Glagolitic and Cyrillic
(Appendix B), but within a century the more Greek-like Cyrillic had triumphed,
although Glagolitic was used in parts of the South Slavic world into the eighteenth
century. Unfortunately no manuscripts survive from the first century of Slavic
literacy, but the later extant manuscripts show a rich literature, particularly during
the Second Bulgarian Empire (2.2.2).
Old Church Slavonic was a liturgical and ecclesiastic language, and developed
into a full written language used for doctrine, religious writings, translations of the
Bible and for the celebration of church services. Strictly speaking, ‘‘Old Church
Slavonic’’ refers only to the language of the early period, and to later writings which
deliberately imitated it. Old Church Slavonic was initially maintained close to its
original form for all the Slavic converts, and evidence of the early forms of the Slavic
languages are known to us mainly through errors on the part of the monk-copyists,
errors which reveal regional and individual variations in speech. Although it was
South Slavic in phonology and morphology, Old Church Slavonic was influenced
by Byzantine Greek in syntax and style, and was characterized by complex sub-
ordinate sentence structures and participial constructions. A significant part of its
lexis, especially abstract and religious terms, was borrowed or calqued from Greek.
Nonetheless, over time accommodations took place between Old Church
Slavonic and certain of the Slavic vernaculars. There were five major such versions
(‘‘recensions’’) of Old Church Slavonic, and these constitute Church Slavonic. The
five were: the Czech-Moravian recension, deriving from the remains of the ninth-
century Cyril-Methodius mission in Moravia; the Bulgarian recension, revived
several times, for instance in the Euthymian revision of the fifteenth century,
which was actively pursued in Ukraine; the Croatian recension, associated with
the continued use of the Glagolitic alphabet; the Serbian recension, which
64 2. Socio-historical evolution
developed in the eighteenth century into the hybrid Slavic-Serbian written medium;
and, most importantly, the Russian recension (Mathiesen, 1984). Each recension
had specific properties of spelling, phonology and morphology, colored by the
local vernaculars. The first to exert major influence was the Bulgarian recension,
which had the authority of the early church writings. The Russian recension took
over the mantle of Old Church Slavonic when Moscow became perceived as the
‘‘Third Rome’’ after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The Russian Church
declared itself independent of Constantinople in 1448, and the patriarchate of
Moscow was established in 1589.
The development of the regional recensions of Church Slavonic in the Orthodox
countries provoked serious controversy, both within the church, and later in the
debates over the developing Slavic national languages. The situation in the
Catholic Slavic lands, with Latin as the liturgical language, was quite different.
The status of Old Church Slavonic as a single, unified language of revealed
Christian truth was one of the bases of the early Orthodox Church, and led to
later attempts to ‘‘clean up’’ and regularize the other Church Slavonic recensions in
the name of the purity of the scriptures. On the other hand, Old Church Slavonic
was not used for administrative purposes – this role was fulfilled by variants of the
so-called Chancery language, which was closer to the vernaculars, and played an
important role in the emergence of Russian. Church Slavonic was important for all
the Orthodox national revivals in the eighteenth–twentieth centuries, and for the
evolution of Croatian. But Old Church Slavonic was not used as a model for these
language revivals. Instead it acted as a kind of counterweight to balance the
emerging vernacular literary languages against the proven models of established
works in Church Slavonic. The Orthodox Slavs were in a typical diglossic situation,
where they used one Slavic language for church affairs, and another for everyday
business. The resolution of this bilingual or diglossic situation is one of the key issues
for understanding the relation of Old Church Slavonic and Church Slavonic to the
modern Slavic literary languages, and in particular those of the Orthodox world
(Hu
¨
ttl-Worth, 1978; Isac
ˇ
enko, 1958; Keipert, 1985; Thomas, 1989; Worth, 1975).
Church Slavonic is currently enjoying a revival with the resurgence of Orthodox
religious faith in the post-Communist world of the old Soviet Union and the
Balkans. It is still impossible to say whether it will withstand vernacularization in
the years to come, or whether it will follow Mathiesen’s prediction, made without
foreknowledge of the fall of European Communism:
It is not unlikely that the long history of Church Slavonic is finally
drawing to its close, and that by its twelve hundredth anniversary in
2063 it will remain in use only marginally, if at all.
(Mathiesen, 1984: 64)
2.2 South Slavic 65
2.2.2 Bulgarian
After their arrival in the Balkans (2.2) the stabilizing effect of the Slavs’ agricultural
and non-nomadic village culture was counterbalanced by their loose political
organization, and their lack of centralized authority, which made them vulnerable
to organized opposition from a group like the Bulgars. This war-like Turkic tribe
arrived in the Balkans from north of the Black Sea in AD 679 under the command of
Asparukh, and had subdued the Slavs of modern Bulgaria and southern Serbia by
AD 681. The Bulgars spoke an East Turkic language, and possessed a system of
government and social organization superior to that of the Slavs, but their linguistic
and cultural heritage was less solid. Within two centuries Bulgaria was speaking
Slavic. The principal remains of the original Bulgarian Turkic language – apart
from the ethnonym – are some common nouns and place-names.
The First Bulgarian Empire lasted until 1018, when Bulgaria and the whole
Balkan Peninsula became part of the Byzantine empire. Byzantium was the most
important political, spiritual and cultural influence on Bulgaria, and one which
transformed it from paganism into a prominent literary culture. The conversion of
the Khan Boris to Eastern Christianity in 852 marked the beginning of religious
culture among the Bulgarians. Ten years later Constantine and Methodius set out
on their Christianizing mission to the Moravians. And after the death of Methodius
in 885 the survivors of this mission returned to Bulgaria to form the nucleus of a
new religious culture, which included figures like St. Clement of Ohrid, the scholar
and author who was responsible for baptizing the future Macedonians. Boris’s son
Symeon became ruler in 893, and his reign marks the high point of early South
Slavic culture. It was during this period that Slavic became the official language of
state, and Cyrillic the official script (
AD 893).
The Second Bulgarian Empire (1196–1331) was linguistically and culturally more
stable, with a literary flowering based on Veliko Ta
˘
rnovo in the north-east. But the
Eastern empire was in decline. Bulgaria eventually fell to the Turks in 1393. The
ensuing period of Ottoman rule lasted for five centuries, until 1877. With the fall of
Constantinople in 1453, Byzantine culture declined sharply in the old Eastern empire.
In the period before Ottoman rule, Bulgarian Slavic had advanced from being a
vassal language to the status of a ruling, official language, and from an unwritten
vernacular to an elaborate literary culture. Although the missionary work of
Constantine and Methodius took place in Moravia, it was in Bulgaria and
Macedonia that the early Slavic written culture and liturgical literature really
flourished. The advent of Christianity provided the emerging literary language
with access to the wealth and traditions of Greek Byzantine culture. The problem
was how much spiritual, cultural and linguistic independence Byzantium would
66 2. Socio-historical evolution
allow its new converts. In the early years there were many difficulties of dogma and
practice. The Three Languages ‘‘principle’’, for example, stated that the only
languages suitable for religious purposes were Greek, Hebrew and Latin, and the
Bulgarian Church had to win acceptance for a Slavic liturgy, following the earlier
achievements in Georgia and Armenia. Byzantium capitulated relatively quickly
on this issue. After all, it had sent Constantine and Methodius to Moravia to
encourage worship in Slavic. And Byzantium was generally more lenient than
Rome was in its attitude to vernacular languages: the work of Constantine and
Methodius, and their Slavic liturgy, was stamped out in Moravia by papal decree,
prompted by the Catholic German clergy and princes (2.4.5).
The religious literature of the First and Second Bulgarian Empires – liturgical,
doctrinal and hagiographical – was an important underlying factor in maintaining
the Bulgarian language through the years of the Ottoman occupation. Although
the church-based literary activity did not die out entirely, it continued only at a
reduced level under Islamic rule, reinforced by the authority of the Greek Orthodox
Church. Furthermore, as spoken Bulgarian evolved, it became increasingly distinct
from the written liturgical language. Early evidence of spoken Bulgarian in the
written language is found in the damaskini, translations of homiletic and other
work from Greek originals, dating from the sixteenth century and named after the
Greek author Damaskin the Studite. The damaskini reflected local dialects to
varying degrees, tended to use more analytic constructions than were typical of
the synthetic morphology of Church Slavonic (chapter 5), and permitted the use of
Turkish loan-words (chapter 9). But they failed to create a single viable basis for a
modern literary Bulgarian, and conflicted with the synthetic morphology of
Russian-based Church Slavonic texts, which entered Bulgaria from the seventeenth
century as part of an attempt to revive Church Slavonic as a written language.
The language debate of the nineteenth century, and especially during the 1840s,
questioned whether the new literary Bulgarian language was to be a consciously
historical revival based on Church Slavonic, or should rely rather on the contem-
porary nineteenth-century vernacular. And if the language were to have a verna-
cular base, which of the dialects would be selected? The linguistic controversy was
intensified by the clear structural differences between Old Church Slavonic and
nineteenth-century Bulgarian, which had lost most of its nominal inflexions,
replaced the infinitive with subordinate syntactic constructions, developed a post-
posed definite article and acquired a whole system of renarrative tenses as a result
of contact with Turkish. Rilski had published a grammar of Bulgarian in 1835
which moved significantly towards the vernacular, but there were conservative
forces which attempted to reinstate Church Slavonic models, partly through an
appeal to imported Russian, and Russian Church Slavonic, texts.
2.2 South Slavic 67
The outcome of the controversy was a consensus in favor of the dialect of the
more prosperous eastern area, specifically the historically important centre of
Veliko Ta
˘
rnovo. When Ottoman rule came to an end in 1877, this new literary
Bulgarian was energetically supported in the wider context of Bulgarian national-
ism. In 1879, as part of the post-Ottoman ‘‘rejuvenation’’, Sofia (Blg So
´
fija) became
the capital. In spite of the continuing cultural, political and linguistic pre-eminence
of Russian, and the strong influence of Russian in the mid-century Bulgarian
language revival, strenuous efforts were made then, and continue to be made, to
purify Bulgarian from the Turkish, Greek and Russian elements which have
accumulated in the language over the years. The Turkish element, indeed, had
reached a level of penetration as high as 50 percent (Pinto, 1980: 46). The popu-
larity of Russian texts in the late nineteenth century, which also provided a line of
access to Western culture and vocabulary, in its turn was the subject of policies of
purification, as nationally conscious Bulgarian writers and linguists moved
towards a codification of the language which reflected Bulgarian, rather than
imported, models. Authoritative orthographic specifications, first approved in
1899 and updated in 1945, together with the appearance of widely accepted
descriptive and prescriptive grammars (Andrejc
ˇ
in, 1942/1978), helped to establish
the norms of the language, though today Bulgarian still lacks a complete mono-
lingual defining dictionary (C
ˇ
olakova, 1977–).
The Church Slavonic literature, therefore, has been important in maintaining the
Bulgarians’ feeling of ethnic identity and historical continuity. But it has played an
interrupted role in the evolution of the modern literary language. The lexis of
Contemporary Standard Bulgarian is substantially influenced by Old Church
Slavonic, either directly or via Russian Church Slavonic, especially in its abstract
and liturgical terminology. But the phonology, morphology and syntax of modern
Bulgarian bear clearer evidence of the vernacular. Bulgarian is an example of a
dialect-based language revival where analytic vernacular elements competed with,
and eventually won over, an established, morphologically synthetic, model of a
literary language (Pinto, 1980: 51).
Modern literary Bulgarian, however, is often interwoven with local dialect
elements, depending on the geographical origins of each speaker. As Scatton
describes it:
the speech of many educated Bulgarians represents a continuum, with
the colloquial, non-literary speech of their native regions at one
end and the learned, literary standard at the other. In actual usage,
speakers move back and forth between these two poles, incorporating,
to various degrees, non-literary features into their formal speech
68 2. Socio-historical evolution