The West Slavs are Slavic peoples speaking West Slavic languages. They include Poles, Kashubians, Silesians, Czechs, Slovaks, Lusatian Sorbs and the historical Polabians. The northern or Lechitic group includes, along with Polish, the Kashubian and extinct Polabian and Pomeranian languages. The languages of Upper and Lower Lusatia have features in common with both the Lechitic and the Czecho-Slovak group.
Culturally, West Slavs developed along the lines of other Western European nations due to affiliation with the Roman Empire and Western Christianity. Thus, they experienced a cultural split with the other Slavic groups: while the East Slavs and most South Slavs converted to Orthodox Christianity, thus being culturally influenced by the Byzantine Empire, the West Slavs along with the westernmost South Slavs (Slovenes and Croats) converted to Roman Catholicism, thus coming under the cultural influence of the Latin Church.
Read more about West Slavs: History, West Slavic Groups in The 10th Century, West Slavs From The Bavarian Geographer, See Also
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“The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past,—as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,—the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)