Slavic

The Slavic languages form a branch of Indo-European, descending from Proto-Slavic. Their earliest reconstructable homeland lay around the Dnipro basin.

From the sixth century Slavic speech spread across Eastern Europe and the Balkans, carried by migrants entering the Eastern Roman Empire; by the seventh century the dialects were separating into West, East and South branches.

The Slavs long wrote in foreign scripts, but in 863 the Byzantine brothers Cyril and Methodius created the Glagolitic alphabet for their mission to Great Moravia and translated the Gospels into Old Church Slavonic, the first Slavic literary language. Driven from Moravia, their pupils carried it to the Bulgarian Empire, where the Cyrillic script was devised at Preslav and made official in 893, becoming the writing system of the Orthodox Slavs and later of Kievan Rus.