&_160;&_160;&_160;&_160;&_160;Countries where an East Slavic language is the national languageThe East Slavic languages constitute one of three regional subgroups of Slavic languages, currently spoken in Eastern Europe. It is the group with the largest numbers of speakers, far out-numbering the Western and Southern Slavic groups. Current East Slavic languages are Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian.
Classification
Historical development and current condition assign two poles in the East Slavic languages - Ukrainian and Russian - with Belarusian as a topologically intermediate step. Traditional grouping is south-western (Belarusian and Ukrainian) vs north-eastern (Russian). Virtually the only phonological feature which unites Russian and Ukrainian is the preservation of soft /r'/, and even that is lost word-finally in Ukrainian. Elsewhere we find Belarusian sharing features with Ukrainian, and to a lesser extent with Russian, reflecting the early north-east/south-west division formed by the intrusion of Lithuania and Poland into the East Slavic area in the fourteenth-seventeenth centuries.
