The Serbo-Croatian language consists of three dialect groups which are distinguished by the word used for ((what?" which is respectively 't°, cha and kay. The first, considered to be the most elegant, is found in Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina and the Litoral; the second is spoken in northern Dalmatia, on the islands, in Sofia and the adjoining territory of Croatia; while the third is the vernacular of north western Croatia. The Greek Catholic Serbians used in the Middle Ages the Church Slavic for literary purposes, but this Church Slavic was permeated by Serbian exactly as it was Rus sianized in Russia. Only at the end of the 15th century was the spoken dialect of Ragusa and the Litoral used for literary works, and under the influence of the Italian it reached in the 16th century its highest development and that period is known as the golden age of Serbo Croatian literature. In the 16th and 17th cen turies, the kay dialect of Croatia gained pre dominance. The literary form of the language remained unsettled until the thirties of the 19th century, when Gaj put the shto dialect of Ra gusa at the base of his diction and called it Illyric, in order not to offend any one by the choice of a local name. Meanwhile the Serbia; Vuk Karadzich, had been using the spoken Serbian in his writings. At the present time the Serbo-Croatian is divided into the Croatian of the Roman Catholics, written with Latin char acters, and the Serbian of the Greek Catholics, written in a variety of the Russian alphabet. The two literary norms differ in a number of dialectic varieties, but there has been a tendency to bring the two together, at least the Serbian schoolbooks print about one-fourth of Croatian matter, and the Croatians give a similar amount to stories of Serbian authors. The Slovenians of Styria, Carinthia, Carniola and northern Istria, nearly all of them Protestants, have since the 17th century used their variety of the Serbo-Croatian as a separate literary language, and developed a beautiful literary norm, espe cially in the 19th century under the poet Preshern, out of a dialect of southern Carmola.
Bohemia began to use the spoken language for literary purposes as early as the 12th cen tury, and in the 14th century no other Slavic language could vie with it in wealth of expres sion. John Hus employed it in his theological discussions, and under the influence of the German church poetry a vast number of hymns were written in Bohemian, especially by the Moravian Brethern. There was also a consid erable activity in the poetry of the romantic type, in which it also followed German models. Beginning with the 17th century Bohemian fell into desuetude, but, this time again under the influence of German romanticism, Dobrovsky, the father of Slavic philology, in the beginning of the 19th century resuscitated the older language of the Moravian Brethren and since then it has been used for all literary purposes. Unfortunately Bohemian is in poetry handi capped by its accentuation, because, no matter how long a word may be, its accent, as in the unrelated Hungarian, is always on the first syllable, whereas in Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian it is mobile, but in Serbian there are really four melodic accents, which make the language very harmonious and musical.
In the 19th century the Bohemian dialect of the Slovaks in northern Hungary, for which it is claimed that it is a transitional language between Bohemian and Serbian, evolved a sep arate literature. The writer was fortunate in procuring in 1901 almost a complete set of this rare and quaint literature, amounting to some thing like 1,800 numbers, for the Harvard Li brary.
Slovenian and Slovak appeal to a population of less than 2,000,000 each, which makes their existence precarious. There is, however, another Slavic language, called by the Germans Wendish, and in philology Serbo-Lusatian, spoken in Lusatia by but a few hundred thou sand people and yet divided into two distinct literatures differing somewhat in their literary norms, that of the Catholics of upper Lusatia and of the Protestants of lower Lusatia. After
the Russian, the Polish is the best-developed literary language of the Slays. It made its appearance in the 14th century, when it fell under Bohemian influence. Like the Bohemian, and unlike the other Slavic languages, Polish appears fixed in form from the beginning. In its vocalism it resembles French on account of its nasal sounds, and Italian on account of its soft consonantal utterance. Many of the con sonants have four shades, which demand the addition of two diacritical marks and the use of z in connection with the Latin alphabet em ployed by it. The accent is nearly always on the penult, as in Italian. At first the literary form fell under the influence of French and Italian humanism, which led to the introduction of a very large Latin vocabulary, while the proximity to Germany led to the popular adoption of an exceedingly large number of German words. Polish literature had its golden age in the 17th century but it is only in the 19th century that it developed a rich literature, especially in poetry, that is comparable with those of the other nations of Europe. The closely allied Kashubian, Slovinzian and Polabian languages of East Prussia and Pomerania have been studied philologically, but they have not risen to literary forms. See articles on the languages of this group—Polish, Russian, etc.
Bibliography.— The leading philological periodical for the study of the Slavic languages in general is Jagies Archiv fur slavische Philol ogle, and of late the whole subject of Slavic philology has been treated in the still unfinished work on Slavic philology by Jagie in the Rus sian language. The