Slavonic

Slavonic, 3 groups of Indo-European languages spoken by about 440 million people in central and eastern Europe and Siberia. The groups are West Slavonic (Polish, Czech, Slovak), South Slavonic (Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Bulgarian), and East Slavonic (Russian, Ukrainian, Byelorussian). Byzantine missionaries in the 9th century first developed written Slavic, using a modified Greek alphabet known as Cyrillic. Today Slavs converted by the Orthodox church use Cyrillic characters, and Slavs converted by the Roman church use the Latin alphabet.