Pan-Slavic language

A pan-Slavic language is a zonal constructed language for communication among Slavic people.

Nowadays there are approximately 18 extant Slavic languages and 400 million speakers of those. Slavic communities are quite fragmented and loosely connected linguistically. Usually, in order to communicate with other Slavic people they use English as a lingua franca. But since Slavic languages are closely related lexically and grammatically and are comparatively easy to learn when another Slavic language is already known, there have been numerous attempts to construct a language that could act as a common language for slavophones instead of English.

Old Church Slavonic probably was the first literary Slavic language, it was spoken in the areas around Thessaloníki and it became widely spoken among many slavic nations. Some scholars believe that Old Church Slavonic was not exactly similar to any Slavic language of that time but was constructed. In any case, Cyril and Methodius and their student Clement of Ohrid created one or more writing systems which serve as a base for many contemporary Slavic languages — Glagolitic or Cyrillic.

In Siberia in 1666, the Croat Juraj Križanić wrote Grammatično Iskazanije ob russkom jeziku (Грамматично исказание об русском езику - Grammatical book of the Russian Language). In this work he described in fact not the Russian language but a Common Slavonic language based on different Slavic languages, mostly on Russian, Serbian and Croatian.

Sample (Romanized, original in Cyrillic): "Iazika sowerszenost iest samo potrebno orudie k mudrosti, i iedwa ne stanowito iee zname. Czim kiu narod imaet izradney iazik, tim prigodnee i witwornee razprawlyaet remestwa i wsakije umitelyi i promisli. Obilie besedi i legota izgowora mnogo pomagaet na mudrich sowetow izobretenie i na wsakich mirnich i ratnich del leznee obwerszenie."

Universalis Lingua Slavica - Universal Slavic language, also known as Vseslovanski jazyk ("All-Slavic language"), is an early example of a zonal constructed language for Slavs. It was created and published by the Slovak Ján Herkeľ in his works Elementa universalis linguae Slavicae and Zaklady vseslovanskeho jazyka in 1826.

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