Slavic peoples

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Distribution of Slavic people by language

The Slavic peoples (Greek: Σκλαβηνοί, Latin: Sclaveni, Arabic: صقالبة‎ Saqaliba, Old Church Slavonic: Slověne, Russian: Славяне, Polish: Słowianie, Serbian: Словени/Sloveni, Croatian: Slaveni, Bulgarian: Славяни) are a linguistic and ethnic branch of Indo-European peoples, living mainly in Europe, where they constitute roughly a third of the population. Since emerging from their original homeland (most commonly thought to be in Eastern Europe) in the early 6th century, they have inhabited most of eastern Central Europe, Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Many have later settled in Northern Asia or emigrated to other parts of the world.

Slavic settlers mixed with existing local populations and later invaders, thus modern Slavic peoples share few genetic traits. Yet they are connected by speaking often closely related Slavic languages, and also by a sense of common identity and history, which is present to different extents among different individuals and different Slavic peoples.

Slavic peoples are traditionally divided along linguistic lines into West Slavic (including Czechs, Poles and Slovaks), East Slavic (including Belarusians, Russians, and Ukrainians), and South Slavic (including Serbs, Bulgarians, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Bosniaks and Slovenians). For a more comprehensive list, see Ethno-cultural subdivisions.

[edit] Origin of their original name “slověne”

Ptolemy identified tribes called Stavanoi and Soubenoi, and are one of earliest references under names similar to names from the 6th century. The names are written variously as Sklabenoi, Sklauenoi, or Sklabinoi in Byzantine Greek, and as Sclaueni, Sclauini, or Sthlaueni in Latin. The oldest documents written in Old Slavonic and dating from the 9th century use the word "slověne". Note the first vowel "o", rather than an "a" as in Greek and Latin.

• slovo mean ("word, talk") thus slověne would mean "people who speak (the same language)", i.e. people who understand each other. Compare this with the Slavic word for Germans - "nemtsy" (mutes).
• slava mean ("fame, glory" -related with slovo^{[citation needed]}, because the glory goes from one man to another by word) thus slaviane would mean "people who are famous, glorious ", because in ancient times slavic tribes were great warriors and the fame about them went from one tribe to another. Note, however, that the word slovene was invariably spelled with an "o" in all early Slavic sources, making this theory questionable.
• "The Name SLAV", Essays in Russian History, Archon Books, 1964. that the word sláva once had the meaning of worshipper, in this context meaning practicer of a common Slavic religion — similar to more modern destigations such as Christian or Muslim — and from there evolved into an ethonym.
• Roman Jacobson traditionally linked the name either with the word sláva ("glory", "fame", hypothetically reconstructed IE root *kleu-')
• Bernstein S. B ^[1], it derives from a Proto-Indo-European *(s)lawos, cognate to Greek λᾱ(ϝ)ός "population, people", which itself has no commonly accepted etymology.
• Max Vasmer suggests that the word originated as a river name (compare the etymology of the Volcae), comparing it with such cognates as Latin cluo ("to wash"), a root not known to have been continued in Slavic, however, and appearing in meanings of "to clean, to scour" in Baltic.

Parenthetically, the English word slave is derived from Middle Latin sclavus, from Greek Sklabenoi. By a similar process, Finnic languages use the word orya to mean slave, deriving it from Arya, the name of their ancient opponents.

[edit] Proto-Slavic language

Main article: Proto-Slavic language

The ancestor of the Proto-Slavic language branched off at some uncertain time in an unknown location from common Proto-Indo-European (possibly passing through a common Proto-Balto-Slavic stage). According to a popular view, "the Indo-Europeans who remained after the migrations became speakers of Balto-Slavic" [1]. Proto-Slavic proper, defined as the last stage of the language preceding the split of the historical Slavic languages, predates the 7th century, and was likely spoken during the 5th and 6th century.

The Slavic language group is categorized with the satem or eastern isogloss of the Indo-European language family, along with the Baltic and Indo-Iranian groups. This is in contrast with the western or centum division that includes Romance, Germanic and Celtic languages.

[edit] Genetic origins

The modern Slavic peoples come from a wide variety of genetic backgrounds, attesting the complexity of the ethnogenetic processes in Eastern Europe that started in the Great Migrations period in the 5th century and are continuing today. The frequency of Haplogroup R1a[2] ranges from 56.4% of the population in Poland and 54% in Ukraine, to 15.2% in Macedonia, 14.7% in Bulgaria and 12.1% in Herzegovina(^[3], ^[4]). Haplogroup R1a may be connected to the spread of Proto-Indo-Europeans (see Kurgan hypothesis for more information). While R1a and R1b haplogroups dominate in Western and Eastern Slavic populations, Haplogroup I1b is the most common haplogroup among the people of former Yugoslavia(63.8% Herzegovians, 52.2% Bosnians, 32.2% mainland Croatians).

For additional discussion of these haplogroups, see Genetic history of Europe and articles on particular haplogroups.

[edit] Origins and Slavic homeland debate

The location of the speakers of pre-Proto-Slavic and Proto-Slavic is subject to considerable debate. Serious candidates are cultures on the territories of modern Belarus, Poland and Ukraine. The proposed frameworks are:

1. Lusatian culture hypothesis: The pre-Proto-Slavs were present in north-eastern Central Europe since at least the late 2nd millennium BC, and were the bearers of the Lusatian culture and later the Przeworsk culture (part of the Chernyakhov culture).
2. Milograd culture hypothesis: The pre-Proto-Slavs (or Balto-Slavs) were the bearers of the Milograd culture
3. Chernoles culture hypothesis: The pre-Proto-Slavs were the bearers of the Chernoles culture of northern Ukraine

From the 19th century onwards, the debate became politically charged, particularly in connection with the history of the Partitions of Poland, and German imperialism known as Drang nach Osten. Generally, both German and Slavic want to be 'autochthonic' on land at river Vistula.

Autochthonic theory (the Proto-Slavs are native to the area of modern Poland), before 5th century.

Allochthonic theory (the Slavs immigrated to the area of modern Poland) after 5th century.

The debate has been used as a tool of political propaganda and is often emotionally charged and interspersed with pseudoarchaeology and national mysticism.

Contemporary scholarship in general has moved away from the idea of monolithic nations and the Urheimat debates of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and its focus of interest is that of a process of ethnogenesis, regarding competing Urheimat scenarios as false dichotomies.

[edit] Earliest accounts

The lands of the Elbe, Oder, and west of the Vistula river were referred to as Magna Germania by Tacitus in AD 98. Tacitus, Pliny the Elder and Ptolemy mention a tribe of the Venedes east of the Vistula, commonly identified with the early Vandals,

From Romanticism, the allochthonic school theorem is that the 6th century authors re-applied the ethnonym to hitherto unknown Slavic tribes, whence the later designation "Wends" for Slavic tribes, and medieval legends purporting a connection between Poles and Vandals. The allochthonic School wants us to believe that the medieval kings and authors didn’t know what they fought or who the subdued peoples were.

The autochthonic school postulates that the Venedes of Tacitus and the "Slavs proper" between the 1st and the 6th centuries coalesced into the historical Slavic ethnicities.

The Slavs were "known to other people" as those tribes located between the Vistula and Dnepr until the middle of the 1st century BCE. After that they expanded to the Elbe (Labe) River and Adriatic Sea and down the Danube. ^[2]

The Slavs under name of Venets, the Ants and the Sklavens make their first appearance in Byzantine records in the early 6th century. Byzantine historiographers under Justinian I (527-565), such as Procopius of Caesarea, Jordanes and Theophylact Simocatta describe tribes emerging from the area of the Carpathian Mountains, the lower Danube and the Black Sea, invading the Danubian provinces of the Eastern Empire.

Jordanes mentions that the Venets sub-divided into three groups: the Venets, the Ants and the Sklavens (Sclovenes, Sklavinoi), collectively called Spores. The Byzantine term Sklavinoi was loaned as Saqaliba by medieval Arab historiographers.

[edit] Scenarios of ethnogenesis

Eastern Europe in the 3rd century AD:      Chernyakhov culture      Przeworsk culture      Wielbark Culture (associated with the Goths)      a Baltic culture (Aesti/Yotvingian?)      Debczyn culture      Roman Empire

Historical distribution of the Slavic languages. The area shaded in light purple is the Prague-Penkov-Kolochin complex of cultures of the 6th to 7th c. AD, likely corresponding to the spread of Slavic tribes at the time. The area shaded in darker red indicates the core area of Slavic river names (after EIEC p. 524ff.)

The Globular Amphora culture stretches from the middle Dniepr to the Elbe in the late 4th and early 3rd millennia BC. It has been suggested as the locus of a Germano-Balto-Slavic continuum (compare Germanic substrate hypothesis), but the identification of its bearers as Indo-Europeans is uncertain.

The Chernoles culture (8th to 3rd c. BC, sometimes associated with the "Scythian farmers" of Herodotus) is "sometimes portrayed as either a state in the development of the Slavic languages or at least some form of late Indo-European ancestral to the evolution of the Slavic stock"^[3] The Milograd culture (700 BC - 100 AD), centered roughly on present day Belarus, north of the contemporaneous Chernoles culture, have also been proposed as ancestral to either Slavs or Balts.

The ethnic composition of the bearers of the Przeworsk culture (2nd c. BC to 4th c. AD, associated with the Lugii) of central and southern Poland, northern Slovakia and of Ukraine, including the Zarubintsy culture (2nd c. BC to 2nd c. AD, also connected with the Bastarnae tribe) and the Oksywie culture are other candidates.

The area of southern Ukraine is known to have been inhabited by Scythian and Sarmatian tribes prior to the foundation of the Gothic kingdom. Early Slavic stone stelae found in the middle Dniestr region are markedly different from the Scythian and Sarmatian stelae found in the Crimea.

The (Gothic) Wielbark Culture displaced the eastern Oksywie part of the Przeworsk culture from the 1st century AD. While the Chernyakhov culture (2nd to 5th c. AD, identified with the multi-ethnic kingdom established by the Goths immigrating from the Wielbark culture) leads to the decline of the late Sarmatian culture in the 2nd to 4th centuries, the western part of the Przeworsk culture remains intact until the 4th century, and the Kiev culture flourishes during the same time, in the 2nd-5th c. AD. This latter culture is recognized as the direct predecessor of the Prague-Korchak and Pen'kovo cultures (6th-7th c. AD), the first archaeological cultures the bearers of which are undisputedly identified as Slavic. Proto-Slavic is thus likely to have reached its final stage in the Kiev area; there is, however, substantial disagreement in the scientific community over the identity of the Kiev culture's predecessors, with some scholars tracing it from the Ruthenian Milograd culture, others from the "Ukrainian" Chernoles and Zarubintsy cultures and still others from the "Polish" Przeworsk culture. The Kiev culture was overrun by the Huns around 400 AD, which may have triggered the Proto-Slavic expansion to the historical locations of the Slavic languages.

[edit] Slavs in the historical period

Slavs emerged from obscurity when the westward movement of Germans and Celts in the 5th and 6th centuries AD (necessitated by the onslaught of people from Siberia and Eastern Europe: Huns, Avars, Bulgars and Magyars) started the great migration of the Slavs, who settled the lands abandoned by Germanic tribes fleeing the Huns and their allies: westward into the country between the Oder and the Elbe-Saale line; southward into Bohemia, Moravia, much of present day Austria, the Pannonian plain and the Balkans; and northward along the upper Dnieper river.

A romanticized painting of Slavs during the Middle Ages.

When their migratory movements ended, there appeared among the Slavs the first rudiments of state organizations, each headed by a prince with a treasury and defense force. Moreover, there were the beginnings of class differentiation, with nobles who pledged allegiance to the Frankish and Holy Roman Emperors.

In the 7th century, the Frankish merchant Samo, who supported the Slavs fighting their Avar rulers, became the ruler of the first known Slav state in Central Europe, which, however, most probably did not outlive its founder and ruler. Karantania in today's Austria and Slovenia was one Slavic state; very old also are the Principality of Nitra and the Moravian principality (see under Great Moravia). In this period, there existed central Slavic groups and states such as the Balaton Principality, but the subsequent expansion of the Magyars and Romanians, as well as the Germanisation of Austria, separated the northern and southern Slavs.

In the early history of South Slavs, and continuing into the Dark Ages, non-Slavic groups were sometimes dissimilated by Slavic-speaking populations: the Bulgars became Slavicized and their Turkic tongue disappeared; in a similar manner the ancient Pre-Slavic Croats from the Azov Sea at Tanais by their migration since 8th century also became Slavicized and their early Indo-Iranian tongue then mostly disappeared (except some archaisms in dialects). In both cases of Pre-Slavic Bulgars and Croats, the same is confirmed also by their newest biogenetical analyses, where the main Slavic haplogroup (M173) is very low in Bulgarians (12%) and Croats (23%); other non-Slavic genome types predominate among both of these people.

In other cases, Slavs themselves assimilated other groups such as the Romanians, Magyars, Greeks, Italians, etc. Apart from the Illyrians who inhabited the Balkans, the Croats also partly merged with the Alans, and the Serbs are speculated to have assimiliated a tribe of the Sarmatians called the Serboi, later merged with the Celts.

Because of the vastness and diversity of the territory occupied by Slavic people, there were several centers of Slavic consolidation. In the 19th century, Pan-Slavism developed as a movement among intellectuals, scholars, and poets, but it rarely influenced practical politics and didn't find support in all nations that had Slavic origins. Pan-Slavism became compromised when Russian Empire started to use it as an ideology justifying its territorial conquests in Central Europe as well as subjugation of other ethnic groups of Slavic origins such as Poles or Ukrainians, and the ideology became associated with Russian imperialism. The common Slavic experience of communism combined with the repeated usage of the ideology by Soviet propaganda after World War II within the Eastern bloc (Warsaw Pact) was a forced high-level political and economic hegemony of the USSR dominated by Russians, and as such despised by the rest of the conquered nations. A notable political union of the 20th century that covered many South Slavs was Yugoslavia, but it broke apart as well.

[edit] Slavic populations under foreign rule

In the course of their history, many Slavic-speaking communities came under foreign rule for longer or shorter periods. Poland underwent partition, German-speaking empires appeared to absorb the Czechs for many centuries, and the Ottomans in their hey-day dominated the Balkan Slavs. Even the East Slavs had to submit to the Tatar yoke after the Mongol invasion of Rus.

The Slavs living in Brandenburg and Pomerania were exterminated or assimilated by Germans in the course of the Drang nach Osten; Turkish incursions suppressed the regional hegemonies of Bulgarian and Serbian speakers; Poland suffered decline, partition and extinction as a separate national state in the 18th century. Until the 20th century, certain speech-groups (such as speakers of Slovenian) lacked the resources to establish their own distinctive independent nation-states. Other communities (speakers of Sorbian or of Kashubian, for example) remain as minorities in the current system of nation-states.

Some speech-communities have long stood under the influence of others -- even other Slavs: speakers of Ukrainian and Belarusian came under Polish and/or Russian rule; German-speaking overlords have long dominated the Sorbian-speakers. In the case of West Slavic speakers, originally kindred languages diverged when the Poles, Czechs and Slovaks became parts of different countries (Poland, Bohemia, Kingdom of Hungary, respectively), Slovak becoming considerably influenced by Czech after 1400/1500. A political division (Austria, Kingdom of Hungary) also marks the now well-established border between the Slovenian and Croatian language areas, even if some bordering dialects of the two languages indicate an almost smooth transition.

Despite their frequent lack of political power, Slavs demonstrated resilience, sometimes culturally taking over foreign political rulers, as in Bulgaria, where originally Bulgar overlords became Slavicized. Similarly, in the Republic of Dubrovnik, the locally spoken Slavic language became an official language in parallel to Ragusan Dalmatian and Latin. Even under the Ottoman Empire, south-eastern Europe, except for Greece proper and Albanian, Romanian and Hungarian areas, remained Slavic speaking. In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a Ruthenian dialect was an official language.

Nazi Germany, whose proponents claimed a racial superiority for the Germanic people, particularly over Semitic and Slavic people, plotted an enslavement of the Slavic people, and the reduction of their numbers by killing the majority of the population. As a result, a large number of people considered by the Nazis to have Slavic origins were slain during World War II.

[edit] Religion and alphabet

Slavs gradually adopted Christianity between 6th and 10th century, and consequently the old Slavic religion was suppressed. The two main Christian denominations with Slavs are Eastern Orthodox and Greek or Roman Catholic, while a few are Protestant or Muslim. The delineations by nationality can be very sharp. In many Slavic ethnic groups the vast majority of religious people share the same religion, although many are atheist or agnostic; in the latter cases people still may traditionally associate themselves with a particular religion in a cultural and historical sense.

The Orthodox/Catholic religious divisions become further exacerbated by the use of the Cyrillic alphabet by the Orthodox and Greek Catholics and of the Roman alphabet by Roman Catholics. However, the Serbian language (including Montenegrin) can be written using both the Cyrillic and Roman alphabets . There is also a Latinic script to write in Belarusian, called the Lacinka alphabet. The Bosnian language has at times been written using the Arabic alphabet (mostly in Muslim documents), but it now uses the Roman (in Bosniak, Croat, and Serb areas) and Cyrillic alphabet (in Serb areas).

[edit] Ethno-cultural subdivisions

Slavs are customarily divided into three major subgroups: East Slavs, West Slavs, and South Slavs, each with a different and a diverse background based on unique history, religion and culture of particular Slavic group within them. The East Slavs may all be traced to Slavic-speaking populations that were loosely organized under the Kievan Rus' empire beginning in the 9th century A.D. Almost all of the South Slavs can be traced to ethnic Slavs who mixed with the local population of the Balkans (Illyrians, Thracians, Ancient Macedonians, Dacians and Getae) and with later invaders from the East (Bulgars, Avars, and Alans), then fell under the hegemony of the Ottoman Empire. The West Slavs do not share either of these backgrounds, as they expanded to the West and integrated into the cultural sphere of Western (Roman Catholic) Christianity around this timeframe.

Please note that some of the following subdivisions remain highly debatable, particularly for smaller groups and national minorities.

[edit] East Slavs

Main article: East Slavs

• Russians
  • Pomors
  • Lipovan Russians
• Ukrainians
  • Poleszuks ²
• Rusyns ³
  • Bojko
  • Huculs
  • Lemko
• Belarusians
  • Poleszuks ²

[edit] West Slavs

Main article: West Slavs

• Lechitic group
  • Poles
    • Masovians
    • Polans ^†
    • Vistulans ^†
  • Silesians ⁴
  • Pomeranians
    • Kashubians
    • Slovincians ^†
  • Polabians ^†
    • Obodrites/Abodrites ^†
    • Veleti ^†
    • Volinians (Velunzani) ^†
    • Pyritzans (Prissani) ^†
• Czech-Slovak group
  • Czechs
  • Moravians ⁵
  • Slovaks
  • Pannonian Rusyns ¹
• Sorbs (Serbo-Lusatians)
  • Milceni (Upper Sorbs)
  • Lusatians (Lower Sorbs)

[edit] South Slavs

Main article: South Slavs

• South-Eastern (Bulgaro-Macedonian) group
  • Bulgarians
    • Pomaks (Muslim Bulgarians)
    • Palćene (Banat Bulgarians)
    • Bessarabian Bulgarians
    • Shopi⁶
  • Macedonians (ethnic group)
    • Torbesh (Muslim Macedonians)

• South-Western group
  • Slovenians
    • Karantanians^†
  • Serbs
    • Torlaks⁷
  • Montenegrins⁸
  • Croats
    • Janjevci (Catholic Slavs in Kosovo)
    • Molise Croats (in eastern Italy)
    • Krashovans (Croats in Romania)
    • Burgenland Croats (in Austria)
    • Bunjevci ⁹
    • Šokci ⁹
  • Bosniaks
  • Gorani ¹⁰
  • Muslims by nationality ¹¹
  • Yugoslavs (mostly in Serbia, Bosnia, few in Croatia) ¹²

^† Extinct
¹ Also considered part of Rusyns
² Considered transitional between Ukrainians and Belarusians
³ Also considered part of Ukrainians
⁴ Also considered part of Poles
⁵ Today, often considered part of Czechs, originally closer to Slovaks

⁶ Most Shopi self-declare as Bulgarians. Cognate with Torlaks.
⁷ Most Torlaks self-declare as Serbs. Cognate with Shopi.

⁸ Some opt Serbian ethnicity, with a historical tradition, dating back to the Serb tribes that settled Montenegro many centuries ago. While others opt for Montenegrin ethinicity, first introduced in any state census of the former Communist Yugoslavia, in the year 1945. Some of the ethnic montenegrins, are members of a political party, called the "Montenegrin Orthodox Church", and call their language Montenegrin, which is the same dialect as Serbian, spoken in Bosnia and Hercegovina.

⁹ Both occur widely in northeastern Croatia and also in northern Serbia; their Ikavian dialect is subequal as southern Croats in Hercegovina and Dalmatian mainland from where they once emigrated. Considered part of Croats by most of them, although recently (since Yugoslav disaster) some within Serbia consider themselves a separate peoples

¹⁰ These Gorani are Slavs in Kosovo; but not to be confound with other Gorani (or Gorinci) in the highlands of western Croatia (Gorski Kotar county).

¹¹ A census category in former Yugoslavia rather than an ethnic group in the strict sense. Most Slavic Muslims now opt for Bosniak ethnicity, but some still use the "Muslim" designation.

¹² This identity continues to be used by a minority throughout the former Yugoslav republics. The nationality is also declared by diasporans living in the USA and Canada. There are a multitude of reasons as to why people prefer this affiliation, some published on the article.

Note: Besides ethnic groups, Slavs often identify themselves with the local geographical region in which they live. Some of the major regional South Slavic groups include: Zagorci in northern Croatia, Istrani in westernmost Croatia, Dalmatinci in southern Croatia, Boduli in Adriatic islands, Slavonci in eastern Croatia, Bosanci in Bosnia, Hercegovci in southern Bosnia (Herzegovina), Krajišnici in western Bosnia, Semberci, Srbijanci, Šumadinci in central Serbia, Vojvođani in northern Serbia, Sremci, Bačvani, Banaćani, Sandžaklije (Muslims in Serbia/Montenegro border), Kosovci, Crnogorci, Bokelji in southwest Montenegro, Trakiytci in Upper Thracian Lowlands, Dobrudzhantci in north-east Bulgarian region , Balkandzhiiin Central Balkan Mountains, Miziytci in nort Bulgarian region, Pirinski Macedonci in Blagoevgrad Province, Rupchi, etc.

Another interesting note is that the very term Slavic itself was registered in the US census of 2000 by more than 127,000 residents.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

1. ↑  Full paper "High-Resolution Phylogenetic Analysis of Southeastern Europe"
2. ↑  Abstract "High-Resolution Phylogenetic Analysis of Southeastern Europe"

[edit] Gallery

Three generations of a Russian family, ca. 1910	1961 USSR postage stamp depicting Belarusian traditional costumes	Ukrainians in traditional dress	Slovaks in Serbia wearing traditional dress
Girl in Upper Silesian dress from Mysłowice, 2006	National costume of Lusatian Sorbs as traditionally worn in the northern part of Lusatia	National Kashubian costume	Serbian bagpiper in traditional attire wearing opanci and šajkača
A Bokelj in traditional garb

[edit] See also

• Slavic mythology
• Gord (Slavic settlement)
• Early East Slavs
• Lech, Czech and Rus
• Pan-Slavism
• Pan-Slavic colours
• East Slavs
• West Slavs
• South Slavs

[edit] External links

• The Name SLAV by B. Philip Lozinski.
• The Slavonic Antiquity: Scythians, Sarmatians, Meotians and Slavs by Sergei V. Rjabchikov.
• FROM PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN TO SLAVIC, by Frederik Kortlandt.
• SLOVENI: UNDE ORTI ESTIS? SLOVÁCI, KDE SÚ VAŠE KORENE?, by Cyril A. Hromník (mainly in Slova).
• Site about Slavics, Slavic Countries, Cultures, Languages, etc (mainly in Russian)
• "The Genetic Legacy of Paleolithic Homo sapiens sapiens in Extant Europeans: A Y Chromosome Perspective"