West Slavs
Sign in to savegroup of Slavic peoples speaking the West Slavic languages (Czechs, Poles, Slovaks, Sorbs, Kashubians, Moravians, Silesians), separating from the common Slavic group around the 7th century in Central Europe
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- ethnic group
- Subclass of
- Slavs
- Has part
- Kashubians
Show 5 more facts
- topic's main category
- Category:West Slavs
- Commons category
- West Slavs
- writing system
- Glagolitic
- language used
- Church Slavonic
- described by source
- Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary
Sources (2)
via Wikidata · CC0
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Encyclopedic overview
The West Slavs are Slavic peoples who speak the West Slavic languages. They separated from the common Slavic group around the 7th century, and established independent polities in Central Europe by the 8th to 9th centuries. The West Slavic languages diversified into their historically attested forms over the 10th to 14th centuries.
Today, groups which speak West Slavic languages include the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Silesians, Kashubians, and Sorbs. From the ninth century onwards, most West Slavs converted to Roman Catholicism, thus coming under the cultural influence of the Latin Church, adopting the Latin alphabet, and tending to be more closely integrated into cultural and intellectual developments in western Europe than the East Slavs, who converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity and adopted the Cyrillic alphabet.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “West Slavs” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.