A Brief Introduction to the Slavic Languages
The ‘Golden Age’ is a label applied to the period in Russia’s literary history which saw the rise of and prevalence of the movements of Romanticism, Realism, and Classicism. Beginning in the 19th century and centered in Moscow (Buckler, et al.), the authors of this Golden Age are familiar to Western tongues: Leo Tolstoy, Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol. In his groundbreaking work on Fyodor Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, scholar Joseph Frank conducts an exhaustive study of, among other books, The Brothers Karamazov and traces the author’s common themes within his work; themes such as “man lifted up” as well as the “inherent stupidity of man” are common throughout (903). Thematically, the Golden Age addressed moral, ethical, and religious dilemmas, all of which are present in The Brothers Karamazov and Dostoevsky’s other major work, Crime and Punishment.
Understanding a language’s literature is an essential step in understanding the scope, dimensions, and potential of the given language. This is Russian: A thing of moving gears and complex verbal cases melding together to produce a vast army of books, poems, histories, and human stories. But to comprehend a language is to also look at it in the context of its own family, for languages are usually linked, like a daisy chain carrying words and cognates across space and time, and therefore exist in subtle weavings of different tongues and dialects all nestled together. In the case of Russian, we are looking at the Slavic family.
Classifications
The Slavic family is a subgroup of the Indo-European languages and consists of twenty languages, ranging from Belarusian to Slovene to Ukrainian. With over 150 million speakers, Russian is the most widely-used member language. In total, roughly 385 million people speak a Slavic language, ranging from the Baltics to Central Asia and Eastern Europe (Devlin, 2019). There are ethnopolitical debates regarding the status of the languages of the former Yugoslavia, generally known as Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS) and its dialects (Schiffman, 2004). With the internal political forces within Yugoslavia ultimately unraveling the country in 1992, there was an “erosion” of the “role” of a single language, and today, there are conflicting classifications as to how similar and mutually intelligible Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin are (Greenberg, 2017).
Characteristics
There are some characteristics of these languages that knit them together and allow for classification by linguists. Slavic languages generally utilize an expansive case system. What this means is that words are inflected to represent their standing within a sentence. This is a practice that we see in pronouns in English. In the nominative form, He walks to the store, the pronoun is different than it is in the objective (accusative) form: The ball belongs to him. While this is limited to pronouns in English, in the Slavic languages, even nouns are inflected to show nominative, genitive, accusative, locative, instrumental, vocative, and dative conditions (Browne and Ivanov, 2021). Polish features a vocative (wołacz) form, which is used to address individuals directly. These cases can also be inflected to show gender, with the vocative in Polish breaking down along masculine, feminine, and neuter lines (“Polish Cases: The Vocative”).
Indeed, gender is reflected in most Slavic languages, alongside animate and inanimate objects. If we look closer at Russian and Ukrainian, we see that nouns are assigned to gender classes, like Polish, but it should be noted that the “conceptual category” of gender and animacy is not to be confused with biological sex or gender (Rojavin, 2010).
Russian also features a regressive assimilation when it comes to voicing and palatalization (the act of expressing a sound closer towards the palate when the sound, be it vowel or consonant, is normally not). When voiced consonants (which engage the vocal cords) and voiceless consonants (wherein the air is passing through the throat without engaging the vocal cords) are placed side by side in a word, the second consonant determines the voicing of the first. If a voiced consonant is followed by a voiceless consonant, then the voiced consonant will become devoiced. Likewise, if a voiceless consonant is succeeded by a voiced consonant, the voiceless will become voiced. The second consonant in the cluster will determine whether the preceding is voiced or voiceless (Robin, et al., 2011).
These languages are further characterized as synthetic (Browne & Ivanov, 2021), which refers to the tendency of a language to use inflection to express tense, person, gender, mood, etc. Synthetic languages are further separated into fusional or agglutinative languages. As Slavic languages are regarded as fusional, this means that they reflect multiple grammatical features in a single morpheme (as opposed to agglutinative languages like Finnish or Turkish where morphemes like suffixes and affixes represent a single, discrete category). Within Russian, a single suffix can reflect case, number, and gender.
History
These universal characteristics of the Slavic languages may have originated in Proto-Slavic (known as PSl), a proposed ancestor for the modern languages and dialects that we see smeared across the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Three major subbranches of Slavic languages have appeared across history: Western, Eastern, and Southern (Krause & Slocum). Bulgarian is a notable Western language, while Russian is a representative of the East.
Among the oldest documented Slavic members is the liturgical language of Old Church Slavonic (OCS). Preserved in Orthodox manuscripts, OCS was put to use in a large territory, from Macedonia to the Danube River region in the north. OCS is a Southern Slavic language, classified as such because of its phonological system (Krause & Slocum).
Writing Systems and Literature
It is worth noting as well that there are historically three writing systems associated with this family. The oldest of these is the Glagolitic script, developed in the 9th century by Orthodox monks (Browne, 2018). However, today, Slavic languages are traditionally written in the Cyrillic script or the Latin alphabet. The former was developed by St. Cyril, a Greek monk in the 9th or 10th centuries. It is based on the Greek alphabet, though the Cyrillic alphabet features around a dozen more letters to capture the expanded phonological inventory of the Slavic languages that are composed in it, such as Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian (WETA). The Cyrillic script is always written in cursive when it is done by hand (Robin, et al., 2011). Other Slavic languages make use of an adapted Latin alphabet, such as Polish, Czech, and Slovak.
Indeed, the divergent use of alphabets speaks to the tug of war between what Slavic literary scholars term the “Slavophiles versus Westernizers,” an intellectual showdown that questioned, with particular emphasis on Russian letters, whether the country would be a Western civilization or reject Westernism as a bringer of disorder (the position adopted by the Slavophiles). This was a battle for the soul of the Russian nation and to haggle over the question of whether Russian literature – and Slavic communities across Central Asia and Eastern Europe – would belong philosophically to the East or the West. Of broad interest was the role of the Orthodox church. Active in the middle of the 19th century, the Slavophiles were casting their influence directly over the Golden Age of Russian letters (Mitrevski).
Fyodor Dostoevsky, that great chronicler of psychological motivations and human angst, has been described by Shane Weller (2021) as “profoundly Slavophile,” putting him at odds with his contemporaries like Ivan Turgenev. Frank (2010) asserts that Dostoevsky was “alarmed” at the rise of capitalism in his country and looked to traditional agricultural and peasant systems as valuable to the Russian state and identity (687).
Conclusion
With the great diversity of territories and even writing systems, analyzing the Slavic languages comes down to scope. The Slavic family has produced a wide body of literature and resulted in a substantial sphere of influence. Chunks of the history of the family are preserved in liturgical texts and span through to the present day, a kaleidoscope of dialects and written traditions. That scope is a profound one and one that reaches across time and space. But it also represents a major link in the chain of language, our most precious faculty, and all that it possesses.
References
Browne, W. (2018, January 2). Glagolitic alphabet. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Glagolitic-alphabet
Buckler, J., Hazzard Cross, S., & Vidal Bustamante, C. M. (n.d.) The urban imagination.
Harvard University. Retrieved February 22, 2023, from https://hum54-15.omeka.fas.harvard.edu/exhibits/show/literary_moscow
Devlin, T.M. (2019, March 30). All in the language family: The Slavic languages. Babbel. Retrieved February 22, 2023, from https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/slavic-languages
Frank, J. (2010). Dostoevsky: A writer in his time. Princeton University Press.
Greenberg, R.D. (2017). When is language a language? The case of former Yugoslavia. Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 35 (1–4), 431 – 442.
Ivanov, V.V. & Browne, W. (2021, March 16). Slavic languages. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Slavic-languages
Krause, T.B. & Slocum, J. Old Church Slavonic online. Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Retrieved February 22, 2023, from https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/ocsol
Mitrevski, G. (n.d.) Slavophiles and Westernizers. Auburn University. Retrieved February 22, 2023, from http://webhome.auburn.edu/~mitrege/russian-culture/slavo-western.html
Mówić pol posku. (n.d.). Polish cases: The vocative (wołacz). Mówić pol posku – Learn Polish online. Retrieved February 22, 2023, from https://mowicpopolsku.com/polish-grammar/cases/vocative/
Robin, R., Evans-Romaine, K., & Shatalina, G. (2011). Golosa: A basic course in Russian. Pearson.
Rojavin, M. (2010). The semantic category of gender in Russian and Ukrainian. The Slavic and East European Journal, 54 (3), 503 – 526.
Schiffman, H. (2004). Map of Serbo-Croatian dialects. University of Pennsylvania. http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/540/langdial/serbcrot.html
Weller, S. (2021). The Russia question. In The idea of Europe: A critical history (pp. 94 – 113). Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017.9781108784252.005
WETA. (n.d.). Face of Russia: Cyrillic alphabet. PBS. Retrieved February 22, 2023, from https://www.pbs.org/weta/faceofrussia/reference/cyrillic.html
