East Slavic Languages

This book charts the history of the East Slavic languages from the seventh and eighth centuries, when Slavic tribes spread across the East European Plain and encountered its non Slavic peoples. It traces how Eastern Slavic dialects and written languages developed over a millennium, shaped by shifting social and ethnic landscapes, and how these changes ultimately produced Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian as distinct languages. Engaging with the many contested questions in East Slavic linguistic history, the book offers a clear, well documented account supported by an extensive bibliography.

Mikhail Borisovich Popov is Professor of Russian Linguistics at St. Petersburg State University. He has published widely on Russian phonology and historical linguistics, including the monograph Problems of the Synchronic and Diachronic Phonology of Russian (St. Petersburg, 2004 [in Russian]).Mikhail Oslon works at the Institute of the Polish Language of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IJP PAN) in Cracow. His research topics include Balto-Slavic accentology and Romani linguistics. He is the author of The Language of the Kotlyar-Moldovaya: A Grammar of the Kelderari Dialect of Romani in a Russian-Speaking Environment. (Moscow, 2018, [in Russian]).