The nature of the relationship of the Balto-Slavic languages has been the subject of much discussion from the very beginning of historical Indo-European linguistics as a scientific discipline. A few are more intent on explaining the similarities between the two groups not in terms of a linguistically "genetic" relationship, but by language contact and dialectal closeness in the Proto-Indo-European period.
Baltic and Slavic share many close phonological, lexical, morphosyntactic and accentological similarities (listed below). The early Indo-Europeanists Rasmus Rask and August Schleicher (1861) proposed a simple solution: From Proto-Indo-European descended Balto-German-Slavonic language, out of which Proto-Balto-Slavic (later split into Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic) and Germanic emerged.56 Schleicher's proposal was taken up and refined by Karl Brugmann, who listed eight innovations as evidence for a Balto-Slavic branch in the Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen ("Outline of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic Languages").7 The Latvian linguist Jānis Endzelīns thought, however, that any similarities among Baltic and Slavic languages resulted from intensive language contact, i.e. that they were not genetically more closely related and that there was no common Proto-Balto-Slavic language. Antoine Meillet (1905, 1908, 1922, 1925, 1934), a French linguist, in reaction to Brugmann's hypothesis, propounded a view according to which all similarities of Baltic and Slavic occurred accidentally, by independent parallel development, and that there was no Proto-Balto-Slavic language. In turn, the Polish linguist Rozwadowski suggests that the similarities among Baltic and Slavic languages are a result of both a genetic relationship and later language contact. Thomas Olander corroborates the claim of genetic relationship in his research in the field of comparative Balto-Slavic accentology.8
Even though some linguists still reject a genetic relationship, most scholars accept that Baltic and Slavic languages experienced a period of common development. This view is also reflected in most modern standard textbooks on Indo-European linguistics.9101112 Gray and Atkinson's (2003) application of language-tree divergence analysis supports a genetic relationship between the Baltic and Slavic languages, dating the split of the family to about 1400 BCE.13
The traditional division into two distinct sub-branches (i.e. Slavic and Baltic) is mostly upheld by scholars who accept Balto-Slavic as a genetic branch of Indo-European.141516 There is a general consensus that the Baltic languages can be divided into East Baltic (Lithuanian, Latvian) and West Baltic (Old Prussian). The internal diversity of Baltic points at a much greater time-depth for the breakup of the Baltic languages in comparison to the Slavic languages.1718
"Traditional" Balto-Slavic tree model
West Baltic
East Baltic
Slavic
This bipartite division into Baltic and Slavic was first challenged in the 1960s, when Vladimir Toporov and Vyacheslav Ivanov observed that the apparent difference between the "structural models" of the Baltic languages and the Slavic languages is the result of the innovative nature of Proto-Slavic, and that the latter had evolved from an earlier stage which conformed to the more archaic "structural model" of the Proto-Baltic dialect continuum.1920 Frederik Kortlandt (1977, 2018) has proposed that West Baltic and East Baltic are in fact not more closely related to each other than either of them is related to Slavic, and Balto-Slavic therefore can be split into three equidistant branches: East Baltic, West Baltic and Slavic.2122
Alternative Balto-Slavic tree model
Kortlandt's hypothesis is supported by a number of scholars.232425 Some scholars accept Kortlandt's division into three branches as the default assumption, but believe that there is sufficient evidence to unite East Baltic and West Baltic in an intermediate Baltic node.26
The tripartite split is supported by glottochronologic studies by V. V. Kromer,27 whereas two computer-generated family trees (from the early 2000s) that include Old Prussian have a Baltic node parallel to the Slavic node.28
The sudden expansion of Proto-Slavic in the sixth and the seventh century (around 600 CE, uniform Proto-Slavic with minor dialectal differentiation was spoken from Thessaloniki in Greece to Novgorod in Russia) is, according to some, connected to the hypothesis that Proto-Slavic was in fact a koiné of the Avar state, i.e. the language of the administration and military rule of the Avar Khaganate in Eastern Europe.29 In 626, the Slavs, Persians and Avars jointly attacked the Byzantine Empire and participated in the Siege of Constantinople. In that campaign, the Slavs fought under Avar officers. There is an ongoing controversy over whether the Slavs might then have been a military caste under the khaganate rather than an ethnicity.30 Their language—at first possibly only one local speech—once koinéized, became a lingua franca of the Avar state. This might explain how Proto-Slavic spread to the Balkans and the areas of the Danube basin,31 and would also explain why the Avars were assimilated so fast, leaving practically no linguistic traces, and that Proto-Slavic was so unusually uniform. However, such a theory fails to explain how Slavic spread to Eastern Europe, an area that had no historical links with the Avar Khanate.32 That said, the Avar state was later replaced by the definitively Slavic state of Great Moravia, which could have played the same role.
It is also likely that the expansion of Slavic occurred with the assimilation of Iranic-speaking groups such as the Sarmatians,33 who quickly adopted Proto-Slavic due to speaking related Indo-European satem languages, in much the same way Latin expanded by assimilating the Celtic speakers in continental Western Europe and the Dacians.
That sudden expansion of Proto-Slavic erased most of the idioms of the Balto-Slavic dialect continuum, which left us today with only two groups, Baltic and Slavic (or East Baltic, West Baltic, and Slavic in the minority view). This secession of the Balto-Slavic dialect ancestral to Proto-Slavic is estimated on archaeological and glottochronological criteria to have occurred sometime in the period 1500–1000 BCE.34 Hydronymic evidence suggests that Baltic languages were once spoken in much wider territory than the one they cover today, all the way to Moscow, and were later replaced by Slavic.35
The degree of relationship of the Baltic and Slavic languages is indicated by a series of common innovations not shared with other Indo-European languages, and by the relative chronology of these innovations which can be established. The Baltic and Slavic languages also share some inherited words. These are either not found at all in other Indo-European languages (except when borrowed) or are inherited from Proto-Indo-European but have undergone identical changes in meaning when compared to other Indo-European languages.36 This indicates that the Baltic and Slavic languages share a period of common development, the Proto-Balto-Slavic language.
Common Balto-Slavic innovations include several other changes, which are also shared by several other Indo-European branches. These are therefore not direct evidence for the existence of a common Balto-Slavic family, but they do corroborate it.
Some examples of words shared among most or all Balto-Slavic languages:
Despite lexical developments exclusive to Balto-Slavic and otherwise showing evidence for a stage of common development, there are considerable differences between the vocabularies of Baltic and Slavic. Rozwadowski noted that every semantic field contains core vocabulary that is etymologically different between the two branches. Andersen prefers a dialect continuum model where the northernmost dialects developed into Baltic and the southernmost dialects into Slavic (with Slavic later absorbing any intermediate idioms during its expansion). Andersen thinks that different neighboring and substratum languages might have contributed to the differences in basic vocabulary.44
Young (2009), p. 135. - Young, Steven (2009). "Balto-Slavic languages". Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World: 135–136. ISBN 978-0-08-087774-7. https://books.google.com/books?id=F2SRqDzB50wC&pg=PA135 ↩
"Balto-Slavic languages. Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online". Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. Retrieved 10 December 2012. Those scholars who accept the Balto-Slavic hypothesis attribute the large number of close similarities in the vocabulary, grammar, and sound systems of the Baltic and Slavic languages to development from a common ancestral language after the breakup of Proto-Indo-European. Those scholars who reject the hypothesis believe that the similarities are the result of parallel development and of mutual influence during a long period of contact. https://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/51061/Balto-Slavic-languages ↩
Young (2009), p. 136. - Young, Steven (2009). "Balto-Slavic languages". Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World: 135–136. ISBN 978-0-08-087774-7. https://books.google.com/books?id=F2SRqDzB50wC&pg=PA135 ↩
Fortson (2010), p. 414. - Fortson, Benjamin W. (2010). Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction (2nd ed.). Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-8896-8. ↩
Rask R. K. (1818). Undersögelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse [Study on the Origin of the Old Nordic or Icelandic Language]. Kjöbenhavn: Gyldendal. — xii + 312 s. ↩
Schleicher A. (1853). Die ersten Spaltungen des indogermanischen Urvolkes. Allgemeine Zeitung für Wissenschaft und Literatur. ↩
Petit (2004), p. 21. - Petit, Daniel (2004). "Les langues baltiques et la question balto-slave". Histoire Épistémologie Langage. 26 (2): 7–41. doi:10.3406/hel.2004.2092. https://doi.org/10.3406%2Fhel.2004.2092 ↩
Olander (2002) - Olander, Thomas (2002). Det baltoslaviske problem – Accentologien (PDF) (Master's thesis) (in Danish). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-19. Retrieved 2010-07-30. https://web.archive.org/web/20110719132514/http://www.tommeltot.dk/files/olander-bsproblem.pdf ↩
Mallory & Adam (2006), p. 77. - Mallory, J. P.; Adam, D. Q. (2006). The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-928791-0. ↩
Clackson (2007), p. 6. - Clackson, James (2007). Indo-European Linguistics, An Introduction. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521653671. ↩
Beekes (2011), p. 31:"The supposed unity of the Balto-Slavic group is often disputed, but it is really above all doubt". - Beekes, Robert (2011). Comparative Indo-European Linguistics (2nd. ed.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ↩
Kapović (2017), p. 5. - Kapović, Mate (2017). The Indo-European Languages (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-73062-4. ↩
Gray & Atkinson (2003) - Gray, R.D.; Atkinson, Q.D. (2003). "Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin". Nature. 426 (6965): 435–439. Bibcode:2003Natur.426..435G. doi:10.1038/nature02029. PMID 14647380. S2CID 42340. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d6aef57c-ce30-40fb-8786-f64c4a70afd1 ↩
Clackson (2007). - Clackson, James (2007). Indo-European Linguistics, An Introduction. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521653671. ↩
Beekes (2011), p. 22. - Beekes, Robert (2011). Comparative Indo-European Linguistics (2nd. ed.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ↩
Young (2017), p. 486. - Young, Steven (2017). "Baltic". In Kapović, Mate (ed.). The Indo-European Languages (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. pp. 486–518. ISBN 978-0-415-73062-4. ↩
Dini, P.U. (2000). Baltų kalbos. Lyginamoji istorija. Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos institutas. p. 143. ISBN 5-420-01444-0. 5-420-01444-0 ↩
Бирнбаум Х. О двух направлениях в языковом развитии // Вопросы языкознания, 1985, No. 2, стр. 36 ↩
Kortlandt (1977), p. 323:"Though Prussian is undoubtedly closer to the East Baltic languages than to Slavic, the characteristic features of the Baltic languages seem to be either retentions or results of parallel development and cultural interaction. Thus I assume that Balto-Slavic split into three identifiable branches, each of which followed its own course of development." - Kortlandt, Frederik (1977). "Historical laws of Baltic accentuation". Baltistica. 13 (2): 319–330. doi:10.15388/baltistica.13.2.1129. hdl:1887/1854. https://doi.org/10.15388%2Fbaltistica.13.2.1129 ↩
Kortlandt (2018). - Kortlandt, Frederik (2018). "Proto-Baltic?". Baltistica. 53 (2): 175–185. doi:10.15388/baltistica.53.2.2338. https://doi.org/10.15388%2Fbaltistica.53.2.2338 ↩
Andersen (1996), p. 63. - Andersen, Henning (1996). Reconstructing Prehistorical Dialects. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-014705-X. ↩
Derksen (2008), p. 20:"I am not convinced that it is justified to reconstruct a Proto-Baltic stage. The term Proto-Baltic is used for convenience's sake." - Derksen, Rick (2008). Etymological Dictionary of the Slavic Inherited Lexicon. Leiden: Brill. ↩
Kim (2018), p. 1974. - Kim, Ronald I. (2018). "The phonology of Balto-Slavic". In Klein, Jared; Joseph, Brian; Fritz, Matthias (eds.). Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics. Vol. 3. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 1974–1985. doi:10.1515/9783110542431. ISBN 978-3-11-054243-1. https://www.academia.edu/382815 ↩
Hill (2016). - Hill, Eugen (2016). "Phonological evidence for a Proto-Baltic stage in the evolution of East and West Baltic". International Journal of Diachronic Linguistics and Linguistic Reconstruction. 13: 205–232. https://www.academia.edu/34288492 ↩
Kromer, Victor V. (2003). "Glottochronology and problems of protolanguage reconstruction". arXiv:cs/0303007. /wiki/ArXiv_(identifier) ↩
Clackson (2007) — the so-called "Pennsylvania Tree" (p. 12) and the so-called "New Zealand Tree" (p. 19) - Clackson, James (2007). Indo-European Linguistics, An Introduction. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521653671. ↩
cf. Holzer (2002) with references - Holzer, Georg (2002). "Urslawisch" (PDF). Enzyklopädie des Europäischen Ostens (in German). Klagenfurt: Wieser Verlag. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2007-09-27. Retrieved 2008-10-01. https://web.archive.org/web/20070927003925/http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/eeo/Urslawisch.pdf ↩
Controversy discussed in Martin Hurbanič (2009). Posledná vojna antiky. Avarský útok na Konštantínopol roku 626 v historických súvislostiach [The Last War of Antiquity. The Avar Siege of Constantinople, 626, in Historical Sources]. Prešov: Vydavatel’stvo Michala Vaška. pp. 137–153. ↩
Until the year 800 Slavic languages were spoken all the way to the Trieste–Hamburg line. Later, they were pushed back to the east. ↩
Curta (2004): It is possible that the expansion of the Avar khanate during the second half of the eighth century coincided with the spread of... Slavic into the neighboring areas of Bohemia, Moravia, and southern Poland. (but) could hardly explain the spread of Slavic into Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, all regions that produced so far almost no archaeological evidence of Avar influence - Curta, Florin (2004). "The Slavic Lingua Franca. (Linguistic Notes of an Archaeologist Turned Historian)". East Central Europe. 31 (31): 125–148. doi:10.1163/187633004X00134. https://florida.academia.edu/FlorinCurta/Papers/161557/The-Slavic-lingua-franca--Linguistic-notes-of-an-archaeologist-turned-historian- ↩
Tarasov, Илья Тарасов / Ilia (January 2017). "Балты в миграциях Великого переселения народов. Галинды // Исторический формат, No. 3-4, 2017. С. 95–124". Балты в миграциях Великого переселения народов. Галинды – via www.academia.edu. https://www.academia.edu/37147068 ↩
cf. Novotná & Blažek (2007) with references. "Classical glottochronology" conducted by Czech Slavist M. Čejka in 1974 dates the Balto-Slavic split to −910±340 BCE, Sergei Starostin in 1994 dates it to 1210 BCE, and "recalibrated glottochronology" conducted by Novotná & Blažek dates it to 1400–1340 BCE. This agrees well with Trzciniec-Komarov culture, localized from Silesia to Central Ukraine and dated to the period 1500–1200 BCE. - Novotná, Petra; Blažek, Václav (2007). "Glottochronology and its application to the Balto-Slavic languages". Baltistica. XLII (2): 185–210. doi:10.15388/baltistica.42.2.1168. https://doi.org/10.15388%2Fbaltistica.42.2.1168 ↩
Beekes (2011), p. 48. - Beekes, Robert (2011). Comparative Indo-European Linguistics (2nd. ed.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ↩
Mažiulis, Vytautas. "Baltic languages". Britannica Online Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2008-10-10. /wiki/Vytautas_Ma%C5%BEiulis ↩
Hill, Eugen (2013). "Historical phonology in service of subgrouping. Two laws of final syllables in the common prehistory of Baltic and Slavonic". Baltistica. XLVIII (2): 161–204. doi:10.15388/Baltistica.48.2.2170. https://doi.org/10.15388%2FBaltistica.48.2.2170 ↩
Zinkevičius 1984, p. 120. - Zinkevičius, Zigmas (1984). Lietuvių kalbos kilmė [The Origin of the Lithuanian Language] (in Lithuanian) (1st ed.). Vilnius: Mokslas. ISBN 5420001020. ↩
Matasović (2008:56–57) "Navedimo najvažnije baltoslavenske izoglose...Upotreba genitiva za izricanje objekta zanijekanog glagola" - Matasović, Ranko (2008). Poredbenopovijesna gramatika hrvatskoga jezika (in Croatian). Zagreb: Matica hrvatska. ISBN 978-953-150-840-7. ↩
Lurker, Manfred (2004). The Routledge dictionary of gods and goddesses, devils and demons. Routledge. p. 187. ISBN 978-0-415-34018-2. /wiki/ISBN_(identifier) ↩
Andersen, Henning (2003), "Slavic and the Indo-European Migrations", Language Contacts in Prehistory. Studies in Stratigraphy, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 239, Amsterdam–Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 71–73, It has always been a riddle how it came about that the Slavic and Baltic languages, while sufficiently similar to suggest a common origin ("Proto-Balto-Slavic"), and developing side by side for thousands of years under natural and technological conditions that must have been fairly similar, came to be so different. Leaving the similarities of structure aside and considering just the lexicon, there are indeed several hundred lexemes in Common Slavic that have etymological equivalents or near-equivalents in Baltic. On the other hand, however, there is not a single semantic field in which there are not deep differences in the corresponding lexis. https://www.academia.edu/805660 ↩