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Russian Language Journal

Keywords

Slavic languages, Slavic linguistics

Abstract

There are more speakers of Slavic languages in Europe today than of the continent’s two other major Indo-European branches, Romance and Germanic. Yet over a generation after the end of the Cold War, despite economic growth, tourism, and steadily increasing cultural exchange, ignorance among North Americans and Western Europeans about the basic facts of the Slavic languages remains sadly widespread. Even from speakers of Slavic languages themselves one continues to hear all sorts of linguistic myths, such as that all Slavic languages sound essentially identical to Russian or, at the other extreme, nationalistic claims that Polish and Ukrainian are nothing like Russian, or that Croatian more closely resembles Czech and Polish than it does Serbian. There has until now been no up-to-date introduction for the layperson that would not only counter such myths, but provide an accessible overview of the most important features of the Slavic languages and answer some of the questions that this reviewer, and surely most readers of this journal, repeatedly receives from friends and family. Why do some Slavic languages use the Latin alphabet and others Cyrillic? Can speakers of Slavic languages understand one another? And what makes Slavic languages so challenging for speakers of English to learn? Water, Whiskey, and Vodka aims to do precisely that, to provide a survey of the Slavic languages as a whole and individually, emphasizing both what they share and what makes each one unique.

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