introduction

version August 2017

There is a printed monograph (a book) in English titled: "INTERSLAVIC ZONAL CONSTRUCTED LANGUAGE"

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Welcome to our on-line English tutorial of the Neoslavonic edition of the Interslavic language, which is a part of the non-commercial project of the interslavic community. Interslavic is a "zonal constructed language" intended to facilitate communication among the speakers and writers of the modern day Slavic languages - Belorussian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Kashubian, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Polish, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Sorbian (i.e. Lusatian, Wendish), Ukrainian and their various dialects - all of which derive from an original "Proto-Slavic" tongue, which over thousands of years, morphed into very divergent "dialects," each becoming a separate language unto itself.

Over half of Europe's territory is inhabited by Slavic-speaking communities; moreover, the worldwide population of people of Slavic descent is estimated to be about 400 million. 

European countries with Slavic as an official language (from Wikimedia)

Because our Slavic languages all derive from that common Proto-Slavic tongue, knowledge of one Slavic language will often allow one to have at least a rough understanding of text written in another Slavic language - but not sufficiently enough to achieve a strong comprehension. This fact has inspired linguists and others over the centuries to attempt to create a universal Slavic language that would be more understandable to all Slavs.  Among these include Old Church Slavonic, developed in the 9th century by two Byzantine Greek missionaries and co-patrons saints of the Europe, the brothers Konstantinos (Cyril) and Methodios of Salonica, as well as dozens of other projects since then. What they have in common is that they are all based on the assumption that the Slavic languages are similar enough to make such an auxiliary language possible at all.  

Neoslavonic language design is based on the harmony of following three principles:
  1. To share grammar and common vocabulary with modern spoken Slavic languages in order to build a universal language that Slavic people can understand without any prior learning.

  2. To be an easy-learned language for those who want to use this language actively. Non-Slavic people can use this language as the door to the big Slavic world. We believe, that knowledge of NS enables both Slavic and non-Slavic people greater passive (e.g. receptive) understanding and better learning of the living Slavic languages.

  3. Neoslavonic continues the tradition of the Old Church Slavonic language (OCS). OCS was the first literary Slavic language, believed to have been artificially developed in the 9th century by two Byzantine Greek missionaries Saints Kyrillos and Methodios, who were credited with standardizing the Slavic dialects and were using it for translating the Bible and other ecclesiastical texts as the tool of the Christianisation of the Slavic people. OCS is still frequently used by the Orthodox Church and sometimes also by the Roman-Catholics in many Slavic countries up to the present days. NS is designed as the modernized and simplified but still sufficiently compatible version of this language.  
Our Interslavic project is not the only one of its kind. In the last two centuries, there was proposed a lot of very similar constructed languages​​. The greatest progress in this matter we re-use has been made ​​in the 19th by the Slovenian priest and linguist Matija Majar Ziljski and the Czech translator and writer Václav František Bambas. Moreover, the successful projects of reconstruction of the modern Serbian, Czech, Slovak, Indonesian, Arabic and Hebrew language have inspired our project as well.

Our memorandum says, that our Interslavic language project is based exclusively on forms that exist throughout the Slavic language continuum, and Esperanto-like artificiality is carefully avoided: every word stem, grammatical ending or morphological element can be found in several Slavic languages, ideally in all of them. This design strategy locates Interslavic language at the very center of the living Slavic languages.


Why do we need an artificial inter-Slavic language?

We know that one half (maybe yet more) of the total number of Slav-speaking people has Russian language. If the Russian language would be sufficiently simple and understandable to other Slavs without learning, our project would be unnecessary. Unfortunately it is not. Russian is far from the imaginary linguistic center of Slavic languages. It has a specific alphabet, phonetics, grammar and vocabulary without the universal Slavic validity. The very similar situation we have in all modern Slavic languages, above all in other candidates for the universal Slavic language (e.g. Polish).


Indo-European language tree (from Nature 449, 665-667, Oct. 2007)

Our strategy is to develop and broadcast this auxiliary language in such way that it can be naturally incorporated into the collection of spoken Slavic languages as an auxiliary tool enabling international dialogue, knowledge and cultural transfer without the need of translating information into several national languages.

Our experience is that speakers of Slavic languages tend to perceive Neoslavonic/Interslavic language as either an ancient or remote dialect of their own native language, or a neighboring language closely related to their own. People are often surprised how much they can understand of it.

Spoken languages are living things and we know that no conlang (Esperanto, Interlingua, ...) or reconstructed modern national language (Slovak, Hebrew, Indonesian, ...) in the world is used in the exactly same form as when it was first published. Therefore we welcome anybody – linguist, non-linguist, native speaker, non-native speaker – to join our ranks and work with us on this great task!