The East Slavic languages constitute one of three regional subgroups of Slavic languages, currently spoken in Eastern Europe. It is the group with the largest numbers of speakers, far out-numbering the Western and Southern Slavic groups. Current East Slavic languages are Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian.
Classification:
Historical development and current condition assign two poles in the East Slavic languages - Ukrainian and Russian - with Belarusi...
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The East Slavic languages constitute one of three regional subgroups of Slavic languages, currently spoken in Eastern Europe. It is the group with the largest numbers of speakers, far out-numbering the Western and Southern Slavic groups. Current East Slavic languages are Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian.
Classification:
Historical development and current condition assign two poles in the East Slavic languages - Ukrainian and Russian - with Belarusian as a topologically intermediate step. Traditional grouping is south-western (Belarusian and Ukrainian) vs north-eastern (Russian). Virtually the only phonological feature which unites Russian and Ukrainian is the preservation of soft /r'/, and even that is lost word-finally in Ukrainian. Elsewhere we find Belarusian sharing features with Ukrainian, and to a lesser extent with Russian, reflecting the early north-east/south-west division formed by the intrusion of Lithuania and Poland into the East Slavic area in the fourteenth-seventeenth...
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