Slavic Languages - Influence On Neighboring Languages

Influence On Neighboring Languages

Most languages of the former Soviet Union and some neighboring countries (for example, Mongolian) are significantly influenced by Russian, especially in vocabulary. In the south, the Romanian, Albanian and Hungarian languages show the influence of the neighboring Slavic nations, especially in vocabulary pertaining to urban life, agriculture, crafts and trade—the major cultural innovations at times of limited long-range cultural contact. In each one of these languages, Slavic lexical borrowings represent at least 20% of the overall vocabulary. The Romanian language in particular shows strong Slavic influence at all levels, including phonetics, syntax, and grammar. This is because Slavic tribes crossed and partially settled the territories inhabited by ancient Illyrians and Vlachs on their way to the Balkans.

Although also spoken in neighbouring lands, the Germanic languages show less significant Slavic influence, partly because Slavic migrations were mostly headed south rather than west. Slavic tribes did push westwards into Germanic territory, but borrowing for the most part seems to have been from Germanic to Slavic rather than the other way: for instance the now-extinct Polabian language was heavily influenced by German, far more than any living Slavic language today. For political reasons, there is a tendency to play down Slavic contributions to Germanic languages. For instance, Max Vasmer has claimed that there are no Slavic loans into Common Germanic. The only Germanic language that shows significant Slavic influence is Yiddish. Modern Dutch slang, especially the Amsterdam dialect, borrowed much from Yiddish in turn. However there are isolated Slavic loans (mostly recent) into other Germanic languages. For example the word for "border", in modern German Grenze, Dutch grens, was borrowed from the Common Slavic *granica. English derives quark (a kind of cheese, not the subatomic particle) from the German Quark, which in turn is derived from the Slavic tvarog, which means "curd". Many German surnames, particularly in Eastern Germany and Austria, exhibit Slavic origins. Swedish also has torg (market place) from Old Russian tъrgъ, tolk (interpreter) from Old Slavic tlŭkŭ, and pråm (barge) from West Slavonic pramŭ.

The Czech word robot is now found in most languages worldwide, and the word pistol, probably also from Czech, is found in many Indo-European languages, including Greek (πιστόλι, pistóli).

A well-known Slavic word in almost all European languages is vodka, a borrowing from Russian водка (vodka), lit. "little water", from common Slavic voda (water, cognate to the English word) with the diminutive ending -ka. Owing to the mediæval fur trade with Northern Russia, Pan-European loans from Russian include such familiar words as sable. The English word vampire was borrowed (perhaps via French vampire) from German Vampir, in turn derived from Serbian vampir, continuing Proto-Slavic *ǫpyrь, although Polish scholar K. Stachowski has argued that the origin of the word is early Slavic *vąpěrь going back to Turkic *oobyr. Several European languages including English have borrowed the word polje (meaning large flat plain) directly from the former Yugoslav languages (i.e. Slovene, Croatian and Serbian). During the heyday of the USSR in the 20th century, many more Russian words became known worldwide: da, soviet, sputnik, perestroika, glasnost, kolkhoz, etc. Also in the English language borrowed from Russian is samovar (lit. self boiling) to refer to the specific Russian tea urn.