Who are the Slavs?

As most of the peoples of Europe, Slavs descended from an ancient ethnolinguistic group known today as Proto-Slavs (who in turn split off out of the Proto-Indo-European family of peoples). Spreading accross Eastern, Southeastern & Central Europe as well as parts of Northern & Central Asia, they formed many many tribes which eventually developed their own lects. Eventually, as nationalism grew in the modern era, these tribes started forming new identities as different ethnicities, many of them grouping together along linguistic similarities. Through this process, many of the Slavs earlier tribal identities have become lost or are starting to become seen as regionalisms. Yet, the linguistic and cultural of the Slavs still remains to be, for the most part, a vibrant continuum with no clearly defined borders. Although today we can clearly see the borders between countries like Poland and Belorus, Serbia and Bulgaria, the reality (at least from a linguistic and also in many ways cultural perspective) is that the languages and cultures of many of these countries simply gradate slowly accross borders, seamlessly transforming into each other as one may go from village to city and city to village.