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The Slavs or Slavic people are groups of people who speak Slavic languages. Slavs are geographically distributed throughout the northern parts of Eurasia; they predominantly inhabit Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Southeast Europe, and North Asia, though there is a large Slavic minority scattered across the Baltic states and Central Asia, and a substantial Slavic diaspora in the Americas, Western Europe, and Northern Europe. of Europe.
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Early Slavs lived during the Migration Period and the Early Middle Ages (approximately from the 5th to the 10th century AD), and came to control large parts of Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Europe between the sixth and seventh centuries. Beginning in the 7th century, they were gradually Christianized. By the 12th century, they formed the core population of a number of medieval Christian states: East Slavs in the Kievan Rus', South Slavs in the Bulgarian Empire, the Principality of Serbia, the Duchy of Croatia and the Banate of Bosnia, and West Slavs in the Principality of Nitra, Great Moravia, the Duchy of Bohemia, and the Kingdom of Poland.
Beginning in the mid-19th century, a Pan-Slavism movement has emphasized the common heritage and unity of all the Slavic peoples. The main focus of the movement was in the Balkans, whereas the Russian Empire was opposed to it.
The Slavic languages belong to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. Present-day Slavs are classified into three groups: (2025). 9781137348395, Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781137348395 (2025). 9788677431044, Istorijski institut. ISBN 9788677431044Stephen Barbour, Cathie Carmichael, Language and Nationalism in Europe, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 199,
Though the majority of Slavs are Christians, some groups, such as the Bosniaks, mostly identify as Muslims. Modern Slavic nations and ethnic groups are considerably diverse, both genetically and culturally, and relations between them may range from "ethnic solidarity to mutual feelings of hostility" — even within the individual groups.
The reconstructed autonym *Slověninъ is usually considered a derivation from slovo ("word"), originally denoting "people who speak (the same language)", meaning "people who understand one another", in contrast to the Slavic word denoting "German people", namely , meaning "silent, mute people" (from Slavic "muteness, mumbling"). The word slovo ("word") and the related slava ("glory, fame") and sluh ("hearing") originate from the Proto-Indo-European root ("be spoken of, glory"), cognate with Ancient Greek κλέος ( "fame"), as in the name Pericles, Latin ("be called"), and English .
In medieval and early modern sources written in Latin, Slavs are most commonly referred to as Sclaveni or the shortened version Sclavi.
Jordanes, in his work Getica (written in 551 AD),Curta 2001: 38. Dzino 2010: 95. describes the Veneti as a "populous nation" whose dwellings begin at the sources of the Vistula and occupy "a great expanse of land". He also describes the Veneti as the ancestors of Antes and Slaveni, two early Slavic tribes, who appeared on the Byzantine frontier in the early-6th century.
Procopius wrote in 545 that "the Sclaveni and the Antae actually had a single name in the remote past; for they were both called Sporoi in olden times". The name Sporoi derives from Ancient Greek σπείρω ("to sowing"). He described them as barbarians, who lived under democracy and believed in one god, "the maker of lightning" (Perun), to whom they made sacrifice. They lived in scattered housing and constantly changed settlement. In war, they were mainly infantry with shields, spears, bows, and little armour, which was reserved mainly for Tribal chief and their inner circle of warriors. Their language is "barbarous" (that is, not Greek), and the two tribes are alike in appearance, being tall and robust, "while their bodies and hair are neither very fair or blond, nor indeed do they incline entirely to the dark type, but they are all slightly ruddy in color. And they live a hard life, giving no heed to bodily comforts..."
Jordanes describes the Sclaveni as having swamps and forests for their cities. Another 6th-century source refers to them living among nearly-impenetrable forests, rivers, lakes, and marshes.
Menander Protector mentions Daurentius () who slew an Avar envoy of Khagan Bayan I for asking the Slavs to accept the suzerainty of the Avars; Daurentius declined and is reported as saying: "Others do not conquer our land, we conquer theirs – so it shall always be for us as long as there are wars and weapons".
Around the 6th century, Slavs appeared on Byzantine Empire borders in large numbers. Byzantine records note that Slav numbers were so great, that grass would not regrow where the Slavs had marched through. Military movements resulted in even the Peloponnese and Asia Minor being reported to have Slavic settlements.Tachiaos, Anthony-Emil N. 2001. Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica: The Acculturation of the Slavs. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press. This southern movement has traditionally been seen as an invasive expansion. By the end of the 6th century, Slavs had settled the Eastern Alps regions.
Pope Gregory I in 600 AD wrote to Maximus, the bishop of Salona (in Dalmatia), expressing concern about the arrival of the Slavs,
The oldest of them was Carantania; others are the Principality of Nitra, the principality (see under Great Moravia) and the Balaton Principality. The First Bulgarian Empire was founded in 681 as an alliance between the ruling Bulgars and the numerous Slavs in the area, and their South Slavic language, the Old Church Slavonic, became the main and official language of the empire in 864 AD. Bulgaria was instrumental in the spread of Cyrillic script and Christianity to the rest of the Slavic world. Duchy of Croatia was founded in 7th century and later became Kingdom of Croatia.During the reign of Heraclius (r. 610–641). De Administrando Imperio chapter 30. Principality of Serbia was founded in 8th, Duchy of Bohemia and Kievan Rus' both in the 9th century.
The expansion of the Hungarian people into the Carpathian Basin and the Germanization of Austria gradually separated the South Slavs from the West Slavs and East Slavs. Later Slavic states, which formed in the following centuries included the Second Bulgarian Empire, the Kingdom of Poland, Banate of Bosnia, Duklja and Kingdom of Serbia which later grew into Serbian Empire.
As of 1878, there were only three majority Slavic states in the world: the Russian Empire, Principality of Serbia and Principality of Montenegro. Bulgaria was effectively independent but was de jure vassal to the Ottoman Empire until official independence was declared in 1908. The Slavic peoples who were, for the most part, denied a voice in the affairs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were calling for national self-determination.
During World War I, representatives of the Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes set up organizations in the Allied countries to gain sympathy and recognition. In 1918, after World War I ended, the Slavs established such independent states as Czechoslovakia, the Second Polish Republic, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
The first half of the 20th century in Russia and the Soviet Union was marked by a succession of wars, famines and other disasters, each accompanied by large-scale population losses.Mark Harrison (2002). " Accounting for War: Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defence Burden, 1940–1945". Cambridge University Press. p.167. ISBN 0-521-89424-7 The two major famines were in 1921 to 1922 and Holodomor, which caused millions of deaths mostly around the Volga region, Ukraine and the North Caucasus.Rudnytskyi, Omelian et al. “The 1921–1923 Famine and the Holodomor of 1932–1933 in Ukraine: Common and Distinctive Features.” Nationalities Papers 48.3 (2020): 549–568. Web. The latter resulted from Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine.
During the war, Nazi Germany used hundreds of thousands of people for slave labor in their concentration camps, the majority of whom were Jews or Slavic. Both groups were a part of what Germans claimed to be a "vast racially Dehumanization surplus population" that they "intended to eliminate in time from their new empire", their term for "racial subhumans" being Untermensch. Thus, one of Adolf Hitler's ambitions at the start of World War II was to exterminate, expel, or enslave most or all West and East Slavs from their native lands, so as to make "Lebensraum" for German settlers.
In early 1941, Germany began planning Generalplan Ost, the genocide of Slavs in Eastern Europe which was supposed to start after a major expansion of German concentration camps in occupied Poland and the fall of Stalin's regime. This plan was to be carried out gradually over 25 to 30 years. After an approximate 30 million Slavs would be killed through starvation and their major cities depopulated, the Germans were supposed to repopulate Eastern Europe. In June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, Hitler paused the plan to focus on the The Holocaust. However, some of the plan was nonetheless implemented. Millions of Slavs were murdered in Eastern Europe; this includes victims of the Hunger Plan, Germany's intentional starvation of the region, as well as the murders of 3.3. million Soviet prisoners of war. Germany's Heinrich Himmler also ordered his subordinate Ludolf-Hermann von Alvensleben to start repopulating Crimea, and hundreds of ethnic Germans were forcibly moved to cities and villages there.Berkhoff, Karel C. Central European History, vol. 39, no. 4, 2006, pp. 728–30. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20457191. Accessed 23 May 2024. The Soviet Red Army took back their land from the Germans in 1944. Stephen J. Lee estimates that, by the end of World War II in 1945, the Russian population was about 90 million fewer than it could have been otherwise.Stephen J. Lee (2000). " European dictatorships, 1918–1945". Routledge. p.86. ISBN 0-415-23046-2.
The ultra-nationalist, fascist Ustaše committed genocide against Serbs during World War II. The Serbian nationalist Chetniks committed genocide against Croats and Bosniaks. Also during World War II, fascist Italy sent tens of thousands of Slavs to concentration camps in mainland Italy, Italian Libya, and the Balkans.
In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, and many former Soviet republics became independent countries. Currently, former Soviet states in Central Asia such as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have very large minority Slavic populations, with most being Russians. Kazakhstan has the largest Slavic minority population. Russians left behind in Central Asia, by Robert Greenall, BBC News, 23 November 2005.
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[[File:Lenguas eslavas occidentales.PNG|thumb|upright|left|West Slavic languages
]] Proto-Slavic, the supposed ancestor language of all Slavic languages, is a descendant of common Proto-Indo-European, via a Balto-Slavic stage in which it developed numerous lexical and morphophonological isoglosses with the . In the framework of the Kurgan hypothesis, "the Indo-Europeans who remained after the migrations from became speakers of Balto-Slavic".
Proto-Slavic is defined as the last stage of the language preceding the geographical split of the historical Slavic languages. That language was uniform, and on the basis of borrowings from foreign languages and Slavic borrowings into other languages, it cannot be said to have any recognizable dialects, which suggests that there was, at one time, a relatively-small Slavic urheimat. However, from a historical and archaeological point of view, the existence of a homogeneous Proto-Slavic people is judged improbable.
Slavic linguistic unity was to some extent visible as late as Old Church Slavonic manuscripts which, though based on local Slavic speech of Thessaloniki, could still serve the purpose of the first common Slavic literary language.J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (2006), pp. 25–26.
Standardised Slavic languages that have official status in at least one country are: Belarusian, Bosnian language, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech language, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Polish language, Russian language, Serbian language, Slovak language, Slovene language, and Ukrainian. Russian is the most spoken Slavic language, and is the most spoken native language in Europe.
The alphabets used for Slavic languages are usually connected to the dominant religion among the respective ethnic groups. Orthodox Christians use the Cyrillic script while Catholics use the Latin alphabet; the Bosniaks, who are Muslim, also use the Latin alphabet and Cyrillic alphabet in Serbia. Additionally, some Eastern Catholics and Latin Church use the Cyrillic alphabet. Serbian and Montenegrin use both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. There is also a Latin script to write in Belarusian, called Łacinka and in Ukrainian, called Latynka.
East Slavs have origins in early Slavic tribes who mixed and contacted with Finnic peoples, Balts9788131760338, Pearson Education India. . ISBN 9788131760338 and with the remnants of the people of the Goths. Tarasov I.M. On the Mention of the Dnieper Varangians in the Context of the Legend of the Beginning of Kiev. 2023. P. 59–60 Their early Slavic component, Antes people, mixed or absorbed Iranian peoples, and later received influence from the Khazars and Vikings. The East Slavs trace their national origins to the tribal unions of Kievan Rus' and Rus' Khaganate, beginning in the 10th century. They came particularly under the influence of the Byzantine Empire and of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
South Slavs from most of the region have origins in early Slavic tribes who mixed with the local Proto-Balkanic tribes (Illyrian tribes, Dacian tribes, Thracian tribes, Paeonian tribes, Hellenic tribes), and Celtic tribes (particularly the Scordisci), as well as with Romans (and the Romanized remnants of the former groups), and also with remnants of temporarily settled invading East Germanic, Asiatic or Caucasian tribes such as Gepids, Huns, Avars, Goths and Bulgars. The original inhabitants of present-day Slovenia and continental Croatia have origins in early Slavic tribes who mixed with Romans and romanized Celtic and Illyrian people as well as with Avars and Germanic peoples (Lombards and East Goths). The South Slavs (except the Slovenes and Croats) came under the cultural sphere of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire), of the Ottoman Empire and of the Eastern Orthodox Church and Islam, while the Slovenes and the Croats were influenced by the Western Roman Empire (Latin) and thus by the Catholic Church in a similar fashion to that of the West Slavs.
Only Northern Russians among East and West Slavs belong to a different, " Northern European" genetic cluster, along with Balts, Germanic and Baltic Finnic peoples (Northern Russian populations are very similar to Balts).
The 2006 Y-DNA study results "suggest that the Slavic expansion started from the territory of present-day Ukraine, thus supporting the hypothesis placing the earliest known homeland of Slavs in the basin of the middle Dnieper". According to genetic studies until 2020, the distribution, variance and frequency of the Y-DNA haplogroups R1a and I2 and their subclades R-M558, R-M458 and I-CTS10228 among South Slavs correlate with the spread of Slavic languages during the medieval Slavic expansion from Eastern Europe, most probably from the territory of present-day Ukraine and Lesser Poland.
According to a 2017 study, Slavic speakers like Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians have similar genetic components. Ukrainians and Belarusians have near-equal amounts of two "European components", which are commonly found in North Europe and Caucasus respectively. There is also no evidence of Asian admixture. However, samples of Novosibirsk residents and Old Believers in Siberia have 5-10% Central Siberian ancestry despite being genetically close to European Slavs.
Among Slavic populations who profess a religion, the majority of contemporary Christian Slavs are Orthodox, followed by Catholic. The majority of Muslim Slavs follow the Hanafi school of the Sunni branch of Islam. Religious delineations by nationality can be very sharp; usually in the Slavic ethnic groups, the vast majority of religious people share the same religion.
Mainly Eastern Orthodoxy: (2014). 9781349461202 ISBN 9781349461202
Mainly Catholicism:
Mainly Islam:
A notable exception is Greece, where Slavs were Hellenized because Byzantine Greeks were more numerous, especially with more Greeks returning to Greece in the 9th century and the influence of the church and administration, however, Slavicized regions within Macedonia, Thrace and Moesia Inferior also had a larger portion of locals compared to migrating Slavs.Florin Curta's An ironic smile: the Carpathian Mountains and the migration of the Slavs, Studia mediaevalia Europaea et orientalia. Miscellanea in honorem professoris emeriti Victor Spinei oblata, edited by George Bilavschi and Dan Aparaschivei, 47–72. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române, 2018. Other notable exceptions are the territory of present-day Romania and Hungary, where Slavs settled en route to present-day Greece, North Macedonia, Bulgaria and East Thrace but assimilated, and the modern Albanians nation which claims descent from Illyrians and other Balkan tribes.
The status of the Bulgars as a ruling class and their control of the land nominally left their legacy in the Bulgaria, but Bulgars were gradually also Slavicized into the present-day South Slavic ethnic group known as Bulgarians. The Romance speakers within the fortified Dalmatian cities retained their culture and language for a long time. Dalmatian Romance was spoken until the high Middle Ages, but, they too were eventually assimilated into the body of Slavs.
In the Western Balkans, South Slavs and Germanic Gepids intermarried with invaders, eventually producing a Slavicized population. In Central Europe, the West Slavs intermixed with Germanic peoples, Hungarians, and Celts peoples, while in Eastern Europe the East Slavs had encountered Baltic Finns and Varangians. Scandinavians (Varangians) and Finnic peoples were involved in the early formation of the Rus' state but were completely Slavicized after a century. Some Finno-Ugric tribes in the north were also absorbed into the expanding Rus population. In the 11th and 12th centuries, constant incursions by nomadic Turkic peoples tribes, such as the Kipchaks and the Pecheneg, caused a massive migration of East Slavic populations to the safer, heavily forested regions of the north. In the Middle Ages, groups of Saxons ore miners settled in medieval Bosnia, Serbia and Bulgaria, where they were Slavicized.
Saqaliba refers to the Slavic Mercenary and Slavery in the medieval Arab world in North Africa, Sicily and Al-Andalus. Saqaliba served as caliph's guards.Eigeland, Tor. 1976. "The golden caliphate". Saudi Aramco World, September/October 1976, pp. 12–16. In the 12th century, Slavic piracy in the Baltics increased. The Wendish Crusade was started against the Polabian Slavs in 1147, as a part of the Northern Crusades. The pagan chief of the Slavic Obotrites tribes, Niklot, began his open resistance when Lothar III, Holy Roman Emperor, invaded Slavic lands. In August 1160, Niklot was killed, and German colonization ( Ostsiedlung) of the Elbe-Oder region began. In Hanoverian Wendland, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Lusatia, invaders started germanization. Early forms of germanization were described by German monks: Helmold in the manuscript Chronicon Slavorum and Adam of Bremen in Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum. The Polabian language survived until the beginning of the 19th century in what is now the German state of Lower Saxony. In Eastern Germany, around 20% of Germans have historic Slavic paternal ancestry, as revealed in Y-DNA testing. Similarly, in Germany, around 20% of the foreign surnames are of Slavic origin.
Cossacks, although Slavic and practicing Orthodox Christianity, came from a mix of ethnic backgrounds, including Tatars and other peoples. The Gorals of southern Poland and northern Slovakia are partially descended from the originally Balkan Romance speaking Vlachs, who migrated into the region from the 14th to 17th centuries and were quickly absorbed into the local population, especially since the majority of Vlachs were already Slavicisation and the term became synonymous with Ruthenians. The populations of Moravian Wallachia, Carpathian Ruthenia and parts of northern Slovakia are also descended partially from the Vlachs. Conversely, some Slavs were assimilated into other populations. Although the majority continued towards Southeast Europe, attracted by the riches of the area that became the state of Bulgaria, a few remained in the Carpathian Basin in Central Europe and were assimilated into the Hungarian people people. Numerous rivers and places in Romania have a name with Slavic origins.
]] of Russia according to the 2010 census:
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Winkler Prins (2002) estimated the number of Slavs worldwide to be around 260 million at the time. Currently it is estimated that there are 300 million Slavic inhabitants in Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Europe.
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| Russians |
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| Rusyns (incl. Boykos, Lemkos, Hutsuls) | |
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| Slavs in Greece (also a sub-ethnic category of Macedonians and Bulgarians) | |
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| Ukrainians |
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| Yugoslavs (a supra-ethnic category of Bosniaks, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs and Slovenes) |
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