Balto-Slavic Languages - Historical Expansion

Historical Expansion

The sudden expansion of Proto-Slavic in the sixth and the seventh century (around AD 600, uniform Proto-Slavic with no detectable dialectal differentiation was spoken from Thessaloniki in Greece to Novgorod in Russia) is according to some connected to the hypothesis that Proto-Slavic was in fact a koiné of the Avar state, i.e. the language of the administration and military rule of the Avar khaganate in Eastern Europe. It is well-known from historical sources that Slavs and Avars jointly attacked the Byzantine Empire and laid siege to Constantinople. According to that interpretation, Avars were a thin layer of military aristocracy in that state/alliance, while the Slavs were a military caste – warriors (i.e. not a nation or ethnicity in the proper sense of that word). Their language – at first possibly only one local speech – once koinéized, became a lingua franca of the Avar state. This might explain how Proto-Slavic spread to the Balkans and the areas of the Danubian basin, and would also explain why the Avars were assimilated so fast, leaving practically no linguistic traces, and that Proto-Slavic was so unusually uniform. However, such a theory fails to explain how Slavic spread to Eastern Europe, an area which had no historical links with the Avar Khanate.

That sudden expansion of Proto-Slavic erased most of the idioms of the Balto-Slavic dialect continuum, which left us today with only two branches: Baltic and Slavic (or East Baltic, West Baltic, and Slavic in the minority view). This secession of the Balto-Slavic dialect ancestral to Proto-Slavic is estimated on archaeological and glottochronological criteria to have occurred sometime in the period 1500–1000 BCE.