Slovo means “word,” and the Slavs likely named themselves for it: *slověne — “the people of the word.” Their neighbours who spoke Germanic got the name *němьci — “the mute ones.” This page traces how one prehistoric dialect, spoken in the marshes between the Vistula and the Dnieper, forked — and forked, and forked again — into the largest language family in Europe: a river of time below, a real map of the great dispersal, and a set of words you can watch mutate branch by branch.
Time flows downward; left to right is rough geography, west → east. Time flows left → right, generation by generation. HoverTap any name to trace its full lineage; clicktap it for the story.
For two thousand years Proto-Slavic barely moved and barely changed. Then, in about three centuries, it spread from the Baltic to the Aegean — one of the fastest language expansions in European history. This is the real terrain they crossed.
Why so fast? The 6th century opened a door: the Plague of Justinian and endless Roman–Persian wars had emptied the Balkans, the Avars dragged Slavic-speaking farmers along on their campaigns, and Slavic itself — recently simplified, remarkably uniform — worked as a lingua franca. Where the migrants settled, the dialects began to drift; where steppe nomads and later the Magyars wedged themselves in between, the drift became a split. (Modern borders shown for orientation only — the sixth century had other ideas.)
Sound change is regular: when one word shifts, thousands shift with it. Pick a reconstructed root and compare its living descendants — the highlighted letters are where the branches part ways. The last three words tell a different story: what happens when history, not ancestry, picks the word.