| Group | Slavic (with Russian, Polish etc.), South Slavic (with Bulgarian, Slovene etc.) |
| Geography & History | In the 6th century Slavic migrants from the Vistula, pushed by Avars and other nomadic invaders of the Great Steppe, cross the Danube and settle on the Balkan peninsula. They fight successfully with the Byzantine Empire and even reach Peloponnese. The idea of coverting severe invaders into Christianity seemed the only way to neutralize the Slavs. For this purpose, in about 860 Greek priests Cyril (Konstantin) and Methodius translate the Bible into Slavic and thus give Christianity to the Slavs. This tongue of the first Christian books spread all over Slavic lands and is now called Old Church Slavonic. It is obvious that the language used by Cyril and Methodius based on one of the Southern Slavic dialects, probably that spoken around Solun' (Saloniki) at that time. However, the language reflects a lot of Common Slavic features: by the 9th century all Slavs could still understand each other well, the difference between their dialects was hardly significant.In the 10th century, Old Church Slavic reaches Eastern Slavs in Kiev Russia, Bohemia and Poland in the West. In each region specific varieties of the language appeared: one of them, the Russian Church Slavonic language, is still used today as the language of the Russian Orthodox church. |
| Phonetics | Belonging to the South Slavic branch, Old Church Slavic contains a number of typical southern features in phonetics: the Common Slavic diphthongs with r, l turn to ra, la (OCS brada 'beard' vs. Russian boroda, Polish broda); the ancient groups *tj, *dj become *ЕЎt, Еѕd [sht, zhd] (OCS sveЕЎt'a 'candle' vs. Russian sveДЌa). The archaism of Old Church Slavic is seen in the preserved super-short vowels of Common Slavic which either disappear or turn to o, e in all other Slavic tongues. Two nasal vowels are also an archaic trait, kept today nowhere but in Polish. |
| Nominal Morphology | Morphology of Old Church Slavic was highly inflective with a definite trend towards analytism. There were six main types of nominal declension: nouns were distributed not by means of three genders, but according to the nominal sterms inherited from Indo-European. Seven cases are used for nouns; the dual number is in wide use for nouns and pronouns. Two systems of adjectives were used: simple and pronominal, the letter to emphasize a quality of a noun. |
| Verbal Morphology | Along with the archaic Indo-European forms of the verb (the aorist tense, the traces of the ancient imperfect), several complex analytic constructions are formed with the help of the verb 'to be' and the participle. Therefore there are two simple and two complex past tenses in the language. The future meaning was often expressed by the prefixed present forms. Apart from the infinitive, another verbal noun was used: the supine which was posited after the verbs of motion. |
| Lexicon | The majority of Old Church Slavic forms have their direwct cognates in other Indo-European languages. Besides the original Slavic vocabulary, a number of ancient Iranian and Germanic loanwords exist. Translating the Bible, Byzantine priests introduced pleanty of Greek, Latin and Hebrew words into Slavic. |
| Writing | Cyrillic Alphabet, Glagolitic Alphabet |
| Close Contacts | As the Bible was translated from Greek, a great number of Greek traits appear in orthography and the lexicon of Old Church Slavic. Latin also influenced the language. |
| Sample | 
At this time cam Jesus in Peter's house and saw his mother-in-law lying, the fire burned inside her. And he touched her with his arm, and the fire left her. And she stood up and served him everywhere she was. (Ostromir's Bible, 10th cent.) |
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