Slavs named themselves the people of the word, and Germans the mute ones
The name Slav probably grew from slovo, word: the Slavs were those who understood one another. Their term for Germans meant roughly the silent or mumbling people. That old linguistic snub still echoes in Slavic words for Germany, and the same ancient root also gave Greek its word for fame.
Linguists reconstruct the Proto-Slavic self-name as *Slověninъ, plural Slověne, and usually tie it to slovo. The contrast was with *němьcь, from a root meaning mute. Slovo sits in a family with slava, glory, and sluh, hearing, all traced to an Indo-European root about being spoken of. Its distant relatives include Greek kleos, fame, preserved in the name Pericles, and even English loud.
Outsiders noticed the Slavs early. Roman writers of the first and second centuries described a people called Veneti living between the upper Vistula and the Dnieper, east of the Germanic Suebi and west of the Sarmatians. In the sixth century, under Justinian I, Byzantine historians such as Procopius and Jordanes wrote of Sclaveni and Antes pushing out of the Carpathian and lower Danube region into imperial provinces. Procopius gives the earliest surviving use of the ethnonym, in several Greek spellings, while Old Church Slavonic texts of the ninth century record Slověne in the Slavs' own voice.
Between the sixth and seventh centuries Slavic groups came to hold much of Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe, and Christianisation began in the seventh. By the twelfth century they formed the core of medieval states: Kievan Rus' in the east, the Bulgarian Empire and Serbia in the south, Great Moravia, Bohemia and Poland in the west.
Today the Slavic languages form part of the Balto-Slavic branch of Indo-European, and speakers are grouped as West, East and South Slavs, with Poles, Russians and Serbs among the largest. Unity is more linguistic than cultural. Most are Christian, but Bosniaks largely identify as Muslim, and relations between Slavic nations can swing from solidarity to hostility. A pan-Slavic movement from the mid-1800s stressed shared heritage, especially in the Balkans, often looking to Russia for backing.
Source: Slavs
