{
  "author": "ChronologiaOS editorial guides",
  "date": "2026-10-09",
  "department": "Writing & Languages",
  "department_id": "WRITING",
  "epistemic_label": "Source guide",
  "epistemic_status": "SOURCE_GUIDE",
  "period": "1st millennium BCE onward",
  "place": "Eastern Europe",
  "public_sources": [
    {
      "publisher": "Yale University Press",
      "title": "Alexander M. Schenker, The Dawn of Slavic: An Introduction to Slavic Philology, Yale University Press, 1995.",
      "type": "Reference book",
      "url": "https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300212402/dawn-slavic"
    },
    {
      "publisher": "Routledge",
      "title": "Bernard Comrie and Greville G. Corbett (eds.), The Slavonic Languages, Routledge, 1993.",
      "type": "Reference book",
      "url": "https://www.routledge.com/The-Slavonic-Languages/Comrie-Corbett/p/book/9780415280785"
    },
    {
      "publisher": "Routledge",
      "title": "Mate Kapovi\u0107 (ed.), The Indo-European Languages, 2nd ed., Routledge, 2017.",
      "type": "Reference book",
      "url": "https://www.routledge.com/The-Indo-European-Languages-2nd-Edition/Kapovic/p/book/9780415730624"
    }
  ],
  "publication_state": "PUBLIC",
  "read_time": "3 min read",
  "sections": [
    {
      "body": "Schenker's The Dawn of Slavic connects Slavic settlement and migration, the development of the language from its Indo-European origins, and the beginnings of Slavic writing in Old Church Slavonic. The research record models Proto-Slavic as a long reconstructed continuum rather than a dated event.",
      "heading": "Start with the dawn",
      "source": 0
    },
    {
      "body": "The Slavonic Languages, edited by Comrie and Corbett, treats each living Slavic language and the extinct Old Church Slavonic and Polabian with the same structure: history, phonology, grammar, dialects. It is the reference used here for classification.",
      "heading": "A family of living languages",
      "source": 1
    },
    {
      "body": "Kapovi\u0107's survey of the Indo-European languages includes a Balto-Slavic section, which is where the record places the ancestor shared with Baltic. Old East Slavic is kept as a conventional cover term for medieval varieties, and modern Russian as a gradual emergence rather than a single-date birth.",
      "heading": "The wider branch",
      "source": 2
    },
    {
      "body": "If the first written Slavic is Old Church Slavonic, a liturgical language, what can and cannot it tell you about how people spoke in Kyiv or Novgorod?",
      "heading": "A question to carry forward"
    }
  ],
  "short_title": "When did Russian begin?",
  "slug": "from-proto-slavic-to-russian",
  "summary": "Follow the Slavic branch from its Balto-Slavic ancestor through Old Church Slavonic and Old East Slavic to modern Russian, and see why the record refuses single-date origins.",
  "tags": [
    "Slavic",
    "Russian",
    "Old Church Slavonic",
    "Old East Slavic",
    "Language history"
  ],
  "title": "From Proto-Slavic to Russian: a continuum, not a birthday."
}