STUDIES IN RUSSIAN 521 



divided. The first, or Southern group, comprises Bulgarian and its 

 Macedonian dialects, Serbo-Croatian (Servia, Old Servia, Bosnia, 

 Herzegovinia, Montenegro, the Serbian colonies of Macedonia, Croatia, 

 and Slavonia, the southern comitats of Hungary, Dalmatia, part of 

 Istria), Slovenish (with Laybach, capital of Carniola, and Sjubljano 

 as centre), and finally Old Slavic, also called Church Slavic because 

 it was the language of the first Slavic translations of the Scriptures. 

 The Old Slavic died out at the end of the eleventh century, and is 

 not, as has been falsely believed at times, the common ancestor of 

 the modern Slavic idioms, but a sister language. It is precious on 

 account of its antiquity, and beyond doubt originated in Saloniki, 

 the city of the two Slavic apostles Cyril and Methodius. It re- 

 sembles the Old Bulgarian enough to justify excellent linguists in 

 designating it by this name. The third, or Western group, comprises 

 Polish and Kachoubish (dialect spoken to the west and north of 

 Danzig), Czecho-Moravian and Slovakish (Bohemia, Moravia, and 

 the northern comitats of Hungaria), Lusatian,or Serbian of Lusatia, 

 and finally Polabish, or Slavic of the inhabitants of the Baltic coast, 

 a language dead since the seventeenth century. 



As for the importance of Russian among the other Slavic lan- 

 guages, it can be measured by the number of people who speak it, that 

 is, by more than eighty millions (for Russian, Little Russian, and 

 White Russian taken together), while the different Southern Slavic 

 languages are spoken by not over thirteen millions, and the Western 

 Slavic languages by hardly more than twenty millions. 



But, when the origins of Russian have been explained, when, after 

 examining Russian by itself, there have been noted certain facts of 

 linguistic preservation, which, from the point of view of phonetics 

 or accentuation (movable accentuation) as well as of morphology or 

 syntax, show Russian to be one of the Slavic languages which has 

 persisted most scrupulously faithful to the common Indo-European 

 model, the essential features which contribute to determining its 

 personal character have not been exhausted. One feature particu- 

 larly deserves to be brought to light, and. because of its persistence 

 through centuries, to arrest the attention. Since the moment when 

 Russians appear in history until the present hour, the continued 

 extension of their language has been assured by the continued 

 progress of their colonization. The history of the Russian language is 

 in measure only one of the aspects of the history of Russia itself; 

 step by step the language has followed the colonist. We will indicate 

 rapidly the principal stages of this progress and examine what were 

 the consequences of this mode of propagation from a strictly linguistic 

 point of view. 



In the ninth century, when Russians positively entered into his- 

 tory, the lower valley of the Dnieper was the centre of their dominion. 



