Wikipedia:North Slavs

The North Slavs are a subgroup of Slavic peoples who speak the North Slavonic languages, a classification of both the East Slavic and West Slavic groups together that has been in use for several centuries, but is not universally accepted. They separated from the common Slavic group in the 7th century CE, and established independent polities in Central and Eastern Europe by the 8th and 9th centuries.

Nations speaking the North Slavonic languages today include the Belarusians, Czechs, Kashubians, Poles, Silesians, Rusyns, Russians, Slovaks, Sorbs, and Ukrainians. They inhabit a contiguous area in Central and Eastern Europe stretching from the north of the Baltic Sea to the Sudetes and the Carpathian Mountains in the south (historically also across the Eastern Alps into the Apennine peninsula and the Balkan peninsula); from the west in the Czech Republic to the east in the Russian Federation. There is also a significant share of North Slavic population in North Asia (Eastern Russia), and significant diaspora groups throughout the rest of the world.

East and West Slavs
Although the use of the East and West Slavonic categories is often the standard model, some theorists claim that these two groups share enough of the same or similar linguistic and cultural characteristics to be classed together as one North Slavic branch. The split between North Slavs and South Slavs was caused by migrations of Slavonic tribes and reinforced by the Hungarian invasions of Europe at the end of the first millennium CE, causing the Slavic societies to gradually grow into two separate cultures. The term "North Slav" itself has been used in academic works as early as 1841  and the concept continued to appear in publications in the centuries that followed. A publication from 1938 claimed that "the north Slavs have a little lighter hair and skin color than the south Slavs; and far to the north they have much lighter hair".

In terms of language, the greatest contrasts are evident between South Slavic tongues and the rest of the family. Moreover, there are many exceptions and whole dialects that break the division of East and West Slavic languages. Thus the Slavs are clearly divided into two main linguistic groups: the North Slavs and the South Slavs, which can then be further categorised as the Northwest tongues (Czech, Kashubian, Polish, Silesian, Slovak, and Sorbian) and the Northeast ones (Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn, and Ukrainian) – whereas the Southern branch is split into the widely accepted groups of the Southwest languages (Serbo-Croatian and Slovene) and the Southeast tongues (Bulgarian and Macedonian). This model is argued as being more appropriate and linguistically accurate than the triple dissection of east, west and south. O.T. Ford also writes of the Slavs being "conventionally" divided into three sub-branches (West, East, South), but "in reality" divided only by isolation into two bands that form two dialect continua: North and South – a view mirrored by some other scholars.

The South Slavs have a considerably more Mediterranean gastronomy because of the difference in climate and close proximity of Italy and Greece. Due to centuries of interaction with the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, Byzantine and Ottoman cultural influences in the region of South Slavs are significant. There is a cultural split of the North Slavonic family into two separate categories according to religion: the West Slavic languages are of mostly Catholic countries (who use versions of the Latin alphabet) and the East Slavic languages are of primarily Orthodox territories (that mostly use the Cyrillic script). The great majority of all Orthodox believers are North Slavonic.

The term "North-West Slavs", seen in some sources as a subcategory of the North Slavs, has also been used as a concept in the archaeological studies as well as that of the pre-Christian beliefs of Slavic peoples in the Early Middle Ages.

Languages


The North Slavonic tongues today are:


 * East Slavic languages
 * Belarusian
 * Russian
 * Ukrainian
 * Rusyn
 * West Slavic languages
 * Czech-Slovak
 * Czech
 * Slovak
 * Lekhitic
 * Polish
 * Kashubian
 * Silesian
 * Sorbian
 * Upper Sorbian
 * Lower Sorbian

Much overlap can be found between the Northwest and Northeast branches. Tomasz Kamusella writes that where linguistic continua are considered to start and end is usually dictated by politics rather than linguistics, which is the case among North Slavonic nations too. Ukrainian and Belarusian have both been hugely influenced by Polish in the past centuries due to their geographic and cultural proximity, as well as to the Polonization of the Ruthenian population of the Polish Commonwealth.

According to Kostiantyn Tyshchenko, Ukrainian shares 70% common vocabulary with Polish, 66% with Slovak, and 62% with Russian. Furthermore, Tyschenko identified 82 grammatical and phonetic features of the Ukrainian tongue – Polish, Czech and Slovak share upwards of 20 of these characteristics with Ukrainian, and 11 are shared with Russian.

A number of now extinct tongues once existed within these groups, such as Slovincian in the Lekhitic subgroup or the Old Novgorod dialect within the Northeast section.

In contrast to other dialects of Slovak, Eastern dialects (so-called Slovjak) are less intelligible with Czech and more with Polish and Rusyn.

History
The first written use of the name "Slavs" dates to the 6th century, when the Slavic tribes inhabited a large portion of Central and Eastern Europe. By that century, native Iranian ethnic groups (the Scythians, Sarmatians, and Alans) had been absorbed by the region's Slavic population. Over the next two centuries, the Slavs expanded southwest toward the Balkans and the Alps and northeast towards the Volga River. In the Early Middle Ages, the North-West Slavs were on the same level of cultural development as the Prussians.

Beginning in the ninth century, the Slavs gradually converted to Christianity (both Byzantine Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism) – beginning with the southern regions and ending at the eastern reaches. By the 12th century, they were the core population of a number of medieval Christian states: the Northwest Slavs in Poland, the Holy Roman Empire (Pomerania, Bohemia, Moravia), Kingdom of Hungary (Nitria), and the Northeast Slavs in Kievan Rus'. During the Late Middle Ages, the main polities of the North Slavs were the Kingdom of Bohemia, Kingdom of Poland, Duchy of Masovia, Grand Duchy of Moscow, the Pskov Republic, and the Novgorod Republic. Lands of the former Kievan Rus' had become fragmented due to the Mongol invasion of the 13th century and would remain so until the first half of the 16th century, culturally affected in numerous ways by the Mongol Empire.

In the early modern period, two major European powers – the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Tsardom of Russia – had large populations that consisted primarily of North Slavonic nations and North Slavic language speakers (primarily Poles, Ruthenians, Russians, Cossacks). Polish and Russian became the lingua franca of wide stretches of Catholic and Orthodox lands in Eastern Europe respectively. Politically, Russia has dominated the region beginning with the fall of the Polish Kingdom in 1795. The Russian Empire continued to rule almost all of Eastern Europe and parts of Central Europe for the entirety of the 19th century up until the outbreak of World War I, which resulted in the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy during the October Revolution. The success of the USSR and establishment of the Eastern Bloc followed. All North Slavonic territories were part of the Eastern Bloc.

Among the North Slavic peoples, the Czechs (specifically, the Moravians) were the first in the east to be Christianised in the 9th century, they later became arguably the most religiously tolerant of the Slavonic nation-states thanks to the Bohemian Reformation. However, today, the Czech Republic is one of the most irreligious countries in the world. Presently, after the fall of the Eastern Bloc, North Slavonic nation-states are split among two different factions: the NATO and EU members of the Visegrád Group (the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (Belarus and Russia). Ukraine is currently a partner of both the CIS and NATO, while also taking part in the EU's Eastern Partnership initiative as part of the European Neighbourhood Policy.