Old Church Slavonic
Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic (/sləˈvɒnɪk, slæˈ-/) is the first Slavic literary language.
| Old Church Slavonic | |
|---|---|
| Old Church Slavic | |
| ⱄⰾⱁⰲⱑⱀⱐⱄⰽⱏ ⱗⰸⱏⰺⰽⱏ словѣ́ньскъ ѩзꙑ́къ | |
| Native to | Formerly in Slavic areas under the influence of Byzantium (both Catholic and Orthodox) |
| Region | |
| Era | 9th–11th centuries; then evolved into several variants of Church Slavonic including Middle Bulgarian |
Indo-European
| |
| Glagolitic, Cyrillic | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | cu |
| ISO 639-2 | chu |
| ISO 639-3 | chu (includes Church Slavonic) |
| Glottolog | chur1257 Church Slavic |
| Linguasphere | 53-AAA-a |
Historians credit the 9th-century Byzantine missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius with standardizing the language and undertaking the task of translating the Gospels and necessary liturgical books into it as part of the Christianization of the Slavs. It is thought to have been based primarily on the dialect of the 9th-century Byzantine Slavs living in the Province of Thessalonica (in present-day Greece).
Old Church Slavonic played an important role in the history of the Slavic languages and served as a basis and model for later Church Slavonic traditions, and some Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches use this later Church Slavonic as a liturgical language to this day.
As the oldest attested Slavic language, OCS provides important evidence for the features of Proto-Slavic, the reconstructed common ancestor of all Slavic languages.