Resources for slavic Languages in General

In higher education and across the language education field, Slavic languages are often grouped together in the same departments and organizations. Historically, Russian has been taught most widely and had the highest enrollments in the U.S. Many other Slavic languages are also taught widely in the U.S. and other countries in higher education, public and private K-12 settings, private language schools, and heritage language schools. These languages include Czech, Slovak, Polish, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Ukrainian. Although they are not closely related linguistically, other languages associated with Eastern European countries are often grouped with these languages, such as Romanian and Albanian.

Czech and Slovak are similar enough to be taught together, and many higher education and heritage language programs do. Though they are mutually intelligible, particularly with some experience, there are frequent differences in spelling and pronunciation of corresponding words. Assessments, particularly those that involve writing, should be language-specific.

Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian are similar enough to be taught together and often are taught collectively as \”BCS,\” despite the religious and political issues that have historically divided residents of these countries. These languages were considered to be one language until the early 2000s, when they were systematically and legally separated after the division of Yugoslavia. (If you are very interested, I can share a paper I wrote several years ago and some other resources on language Balkanization.) In terms of linguistic differences, the most salient feature that needs to be taught differently is the writing system: The Roman alphabet is sufficient for Croatian and Bosnian, but Serbia still uses both Cyrillics and the Roman alphabet. In some ways, these languages are more similar to each other than regional varieties of American English are, but there are some important syntactic and lexical differences that a native speaker would immediately recognize as belonging to one language or another.

TO BE ADDED…