ABSTRACT
The approximate present distribution of the Slavonic languages can be seen from the attached sketch-map. The languages currently spoken, according to their genetic relations within Slavonic (see below) are: South Slavonic: Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croat, Slovene; West Slavonic: Czech, Slovak, Polish, Upper and Lower Sorbian (Lusatian); East Slavonic: Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian (White Russian). In addition, two extinct Slavonic languages are known from texts: Polabian (a West Slavonic language spoken in northern Germany until around 1700) and Old Church Slavonic (Old Bulgarian) (a South Slavonic language attested by a huge volume of texts starting in the ninth century). In phonological and morphological structure the Slavonic languages are very close to one another, more so than the Romance languages. The same applies to their basic lexicon; for more abstract and technical vocabulary, however, there is considerable language diversity, reflecting different national policies towards loanwords and use of native word-forming techniques: thus Russian and Polish use the international word teatr ‘theatre’, while Czech uses divadlo (from a root meaning ‘look’) and Serbo-Croat has two words, the western variety preferring kazalište (from a root meaning ‘show’), the eastern variety pozorište (from a root meaning ‘see’).
