Slavic Languages - Common Features

Common Features

  • Slavic languages have a substantial number of palatal and palatalized consonants, often forming pairs with related non-palatalized consonants.
  • All Slavic languages are fusional, having a rich morphology largely as a result of conserving the inflectional morphology of Proto-Indo-European.
  • Similarly, Slavic languages exhibit extensive morphophonemic alternations in their derivational and inflectional morphology including between velar and postalveolar consonants, front and back vowels, and between a vowel and no vowel.
  • In all Slavic languages, most verbs come in pairs with one member having an imperfective aspect and the other having a perfective one.
  • Complex consonant clusters as in the Russian word встретить ('to encounter').

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