Welcome to the pages of the Interslavic language!

Interslavic is a language used by Slavs of different nationalities for communication among themselves. This is made possible by the fact that the Slavic languages are a relatively coherent family: knowing one of them is usually sufficient to get a rough idea of what a text in any other Slavic language is about. Throughout the centuries, Slavs have learned to talk to their neighbours by means of simple, improvised language forms.

Simultaneously, the similarity of the Slavic languages has also inspired linguists and others to choose a more scientific approach, namely, to create a generic Slavic language that would be understandable for all Slavs alike. The oldest and most famous example of such a Pan-Slavic language is the Old Church Slavonic language from the 9th century, however, from the 16th century onwards numerous other projects have appeared as well, all based on the same assumptions and sharing one common goal: to serve as a language that all people on Slavic territory can understand without prior study.

Interslavic in its current form has come into being in the Summer of 2017 and is based on two language projects. The first of these was Slovianski, started in 2006 as a simple and naturalistic auxiliary language based on the living Slavic languages. The second was Neoslavonic, established in 2009 as a modern version of Old Church Slavonic. Both projects collaborated closely with each other, gradually blended together and ultimately merged into a single standard. As a result, Interslavic is more active today than it has ever been before: it has elaborate dictionaries and primers in several languages, a complete grammar, a large community of speakers and interested bystanders, an annual conference, a collection of original and translated literature, a scientific journal, a news site, and several other places on the net. In 2019, Interslavic was featured in the film The Painted Bird, where it served as the language of the rural population.

Why Interslavic? A language like this can be useful for various purposes:

• Interslavic can be a great help for travellers in the Slavic countries,
• you can address the entire Slavic world via websites, fora etc., without having to translate your information into several languages,
• a person who knows Interslavic will have a better understanding of a text written in any Slavic language,
• for students, it is a great introduction into Slavistics,
• knowledge of Interslavic gives you an excellent base for quicker and easier learning of a second Slavic language.

Learning Interslavic is different from learning a foreign language from scratch. Anyone who knows a Slavic language already knows most of it, because Interslavic consists entirely of material that can be found in all Slavic languages, or at least of material that is intelligible to the speakers of as many Slavic languages as possible. Thus, learning Interslavic is mostly a matter of know how to transform one's own language to make it more intelligible to other Slavs. Listening and reading texts is usually enough to achieve that. For tourists and others who do not know any Slavic language, we propose an experimental, extremely simplified grammar, Slovianto.

On these pages, except for a description of Interslavic grammar, you will find a dictionary, texts, a transliterator and other tools, links and more. A tutorial can be found here. At last, you are also invited to visit our Facebook group, our forum and our wiki.

English handbook

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