Where do Indo-European peoples live? Indo-Europeans

We have already noted that the main material for studying the ancient history of peoples, in particular the Slavic peoples, including, of course, the Russian people, are the data of the language. Written sources testifying to the ancient Slavs appeared relatively late and date from the beginning of a new era, except for a few fragmentary and obscure passages from the works of authors who lived before the new era. Eastern Slavs are mentioned in sources only in the 5th century.

The earliest works that have information about Russians (Rus, Ross) date back to the time no earlier than the beginning of the 9th century, although some researchers speak of the appearance of this name in sources of an earlier time. Thus, if only written sources are taken into account, then the most ancient periods will simply be inaccessible to us. If we are guided by the monuments of material culture, material monuments, then, turning to those that were found on the territory of the settlement of the Slavs in historical times and date back to early historical eras, we will come across such a mass of cultures, sometimes completely different from each other and mutually different. related, that it will be extremely difficult, sometimes simply impossible, to determine which of them should be considered Slavic.

However, it would be wrong to refuse to read the first pages of the history of the Slavs on the basis of the absence of written sources and the extreme difficulty of the ethnic definition of monuments of material culture. We have language data at our disposal.

Slavic languages currently represented by Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovene, Macedonian and Lusatian (Sorbian) languages, which are part of the Indo-European language family. These include: Germanic (German, English, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, etc.) > Romance (French Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, etc.), Indian (Hindi, Urdu, Nepali, Bengali, Sinhalese, etc. .), Iranian (Persian, Afghan, Tajik, Ossetian, etc.)» Greek, Armenian, Albanian. In addition, there were now extinct Indo-European languages: Latin, which laid the foundation for the Romance languages ​​​​distributed on the territory of the former Roman Empire, Hittite - in Asia Minor, Tocharian - in Western China and other so-called "dead languages".

In our time, peoples who speak Indo-European languages ​​constitute the largest group4. Indo-European speech is now heard in Europe and Asia, Africa and Australia, North and South America.

In the distant past, people who spoke Indo-European, related languages, and perhaps some very ancient Indo-European language, divided into dialects, lived in a relatively limited area, from where they settled for hundreds and thousands of years, until they populated the entire planet. Among them were the distant ancestors of the Slavs, who had not yet emerged from the mass of other tribes with an Indo-European language. These were not yet Slavs, but only their distant physical and linguistic ancestors, the Progoslavs.

Our task, first of all, is to try to answer the questions of what people did who spoke the languages ​​of the Indo-European language family, what were their social system, system of family ties, customs, etc., that is, everything that characterizes them : where they lived, in what direction and where they settled, when the ancestors of the Slavs stood out from their midst (as they are called, “proto-Slavs” and “proto-Slavs”), how the ancient Slavic language began to take shape, where is the area that is often called the “ancestral home of the Slavs ”, from where they came out and settled in vast expanses from the Elbe to the Oka and the Volga, from the Ladoga and Onega lakes to the Black, Aegean and Adriatic seas.

Indo-European languages. Indo-European linguistic community

A few remarks about the most ancient period in the history of the Indo-European peoples, among which the Slavic ones belong. Recently, the idea has been expressed that the "formation" of the Indo-European linguistic community dates back to the era of separation from the mass of primitive agricultural tribes, pastoral tribes, to the time of the transition from the maternal clan to the paternal one. According to the archaeological classification, this period refers to the end of the Eneolithic and the beginning of the Bronze Age, that is, to a time distant from us by 5-6 millennia. This kind of statement needs very serious corrections.

Firstly, there is no reason to believe that the Indo-European linguistic community developed only during the period of separation of pastoralists with a paternal clan. Fathers, grandfathers, ancestors of pastoralists, who were engaged in primitive agriculture, undoubtedly spoke languages ​​or even a parent language with some tribal dialects, very close to the speech of their immediate descendants who switched to pastoral pastoralism. And it can hardly be denied that the tribes themselves, engaged in primitive hoe agriculture, descended from the ancestral clan groups of hunters and fishermen of the Neolithic and even the Middle Stone Age, the Mesolithic, in turn preserved some remnants of the speech of the latter.

Thus, some elements of Indo-European tribal languages ​​existed long before the transition to pastoral cattle breeding, the transition to which can only be considered as a factor that contributed to the settlement of Indo-European tribes, their fastest spread in all three parts of the Old World.

An analysis of the oldest basic vocabulary of the Indo-European languages ​​suggests that they existed long before metal and pastoralism. This is evidenced by such terms as, for example, the German hammer - a hammer, associated with the Russian stone and Lithuanian akmio, the Slavic flint, reflected in the German skrama - an ax, the Slavic knife, associated with the Old Prussian nagis - flint, etc.5

The examples given show that Indo-European languages (or Indo-European proto-language) already existed at a time when tools were made from stone, that is, in Neolithic times. There are no reliable common Indo-European names for metals. There is a presence of common names for metals only in certain groups of Indo-European languages, which indicates their relatively late appearance. At the same time, the meaning of the terms. denoting metals and ore, is extremely diverse. For example, ore is blood and ore is what metal is smelted from. The same Goth term exists for both copper and iron (Sanskrit ayah, Latin aes, Gothic aiz - copper, at the same time aisen - iron)6. Consequently, the Indo-European community, before its disintegration, did not go beyond the Neolithic, and its entire history dates back to the Stone Age7.

Of course when Indo-European linguistic community ceased to exist, and there was no Indo-European ethnic unity. The Indo-Europeans of that time (5th-4th millennium BC) were an extensive group of tribes who spoke close, related languages. The origins of this community go back to a very distant past. We can assume that some elements of the Indo-European languages ​​existed in the Mesolithic era (XIII-VII millennium BC)8. The terminology of kinship also speaks of the deep antiquity of the Indo-European languages. This latter was formed back in the period of the maternal clan, when the kinship was counted along the maternal line, when the husband was part of the wife’s clan, the property of the deceased was inherited by the wife’s clan, the children remained in the mother’s clan and all the mother’s sisters were mothers for them, and all the father’s brothers were considered fathers etc. Marriage relations of this kind developed a very long time ago, during the heyday of the primitive communal system, at the stage of a developed maternal clan, when the attitude towards the mother was reflected in the language only (for example, sate - son, literally birth, doija - baby, doika - nurse, etc.) e. It should be noted that the system of designations characteristic of the generic organization is different in different groups of Indo-European languages. This indicates that the Indo-European linguistic unity dates back to a very ancient stage in the development of a tribal society, i.e., not to the time of a highly developed tribal system with tribal languages, but to the era of an early tribal system with tribal languages,0.

If the heyday of matriarchy among the Neolithic tribes of Europe dates back to no later than the 5th-4th millennium BC. e., then the early period of its development, which lasted a long time, dates back to the Mesolithic, when small tribal groups of hunters and fishermen moved from south to north of Central and Eastern Europe following the retreating glacier. This dates back to the time separated from us by 12-10 thousand years11.

The words meat, blood, bone, vein, etc. belong to the oldest layers of the vocabulary of the Indo-European languages. This is evidence that meat food played a huge role in the life of the ancient Indo-Europeans, and not necessarily from the time of the appearance and spread of cattle breeding, but much earlier, during the reign of hunting. This is also evidenced by the wide distribution in the Indo-European languages ​​​​of the names of some wild animals and birds (wolf, beaver, otter, deer, duck, goose). A trace of the hunting image of the occupations of the ancient Indo-Europeans is the Latin ada - skin, fur, and at the same time adata - a needle (for stitching fur). These are all terms of hunters. Later adit means to knit, adits - knitted. This term is typical for the language of pastoralists (wool, wave, d "o ~ domestic cattle, knitting) 12. In all Indo-European languages, words related to cattle breeding (sheep, beef, wave - wool, bitch, gu - bull, yoke-yoke, etc.) Common to all Indo-European languages ​​is the name of honey and drinks made from honey.

There are no ancient Indo-European names of fish and common Indo-European terms related to agriculture 13. All this suggests that the Indo-European languages ​​of the Neolithic were common among cattle breeders and hunters who extracted honey from wild bees, who hardly knew fishing and, perhaps, had just begun to master agriculture .

INDO-EUROPEANS, Indo-Europeans, units. Indo-European, Indo-European, husband. Nationalities, nations speaking Indo-European languages. Explanatory Dictionary of Ushakov. D.N. Ushakov. 1935 1940 ... Explanatory Dictionary of Ushakov

INDO-EUROPEANS, ev, units. her, her, husband. The general name of the tribes of the ancestors of modern peoples who speak the languages ​​of the Indo-European family. | adj. Indo-European, oh, oh. Explanatory dictionary of Ozhegov. S.I. Ozhegov, N.Yu. Shvedova. 1949 1992 ... Explanatory dictionary of Ozhegov

Indo-Europeans- INDO-EUROPEANS, sev, pl (unit Indo-European, eytsa, m). The common name of the tribes of the ancestors of the peoples speaking the languages ​​of the Indo-European family of languages; people belonging to this group of tribes. The Indo-Europeans spoke the ancient languages ​​of Asia and Europe, to which ... Explanatory dictionary of Russian nouns

Mn. The peoples of Europe, Western Asia, Hindustan, speaking related languages. Explanatory Dictionary of Efremova. T. F. Efremova. 2000... Modern explanatory dictionary of the Russian language Efremova

Indo-Europeans- Indo-European eytsy, ev, unit. h. eyets, eyts, creative. p. egg ... Russian spelling dictionary

Indo-Europeans- (English Indo Europeans), a language family, the origin of which, apparently, is connected with the steppes. Indo-European languages ​​spread widely during the migration of peoples of the 2nd millennium BC. in Europe, as well as in Iran, India, temporarily also ... Archaeological Dictionary

Indo-Europeans Indo-European languages ​​Anatolian Albanian Armenian Baltic Venetian Germanic Illyrian Aryan: Nuristani, Iranian, Indo-Aryan ... Wikipedia

Indo-Europeans Indo-European languages ​​Albanian Armenian Baltic Celtic Germanic Greek Indo-Iranian Romance Italic Slavic Dead: Anatolian Paleo-Balkan ... Wikipedia

Indo-Europeans Indo-European languages ​​Anatolian Albanian Armenian Baltic Venetian Germanic Illyrian Aryan: Nuristani, Iranian, Indo-Aryan ... Wikipedia

Books

• Indo-Europeans, O. Schrader. Readers are invited to the book of the famous German linguist and historian Otto Schrader, the purpose of which the author saw in bringing together all the scientific information in the field ...
• Indo-Europeans, Schrader O.. Readers are invited to the book of the famous German linguist and historian Otto Schrader (1855--1919), the purpose of which the author saw was to bring together all the scientific information in the field ...

Civilization arose in the 81st century. back.

Civilization stopped in the 30th century. back.

All peoples whose languages ​​originate from the single language of the Aryans are called the Indo-European civilization. The Indo-European community begins to form in the era of the new Stone Age, the Neolithic (VI - IV millennium BC). It was a community of tribes with kindred roots and close languages. Indo-European peoples formed in the area covering the South Caucasus, Upper Mesopotamia and Eastern Anatolia.

After the completion of migration movements to the south and west, due to the shift of favorable climatic zones for housekeeping, the civilizational Indo-European community broke into local components, which continued their civilizational path already on the basis of symbiosis with the remaining local socio-cults, waiting for the next surge of migration dynamics.

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PThe problem of the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans has not been resolved to this day. The most convincing is the hypothesis that the Indo-European peoples formed in the area covering the South Caucasus, Upper Mesopotamia and Eastern Anatolia. In the IV millennium BC. some of these peoples (including the Hittites) advanced into Asia Minor, while others moved through the Caucasus to the steppes from the Volga region to the Northern Black Sea region.

OFrom there, these tribes moved to the Iranian Highlands and (actually the Aryans) further to India. A small group may have split off in a westerly direction and presumably given the kingdom of Mitanni a ruling dynasty and the technique of war chariots. Modern scholars consider the migration of the Indo-Europeans not as a total expansion (except, perhaps, the conquest of India), but as a movement of languages ​​whose speakers influenced the local population.

LInguists believe that the Indo-European linguistic and cultural community was formed in the region of Western Asia and the Mediterranean no later than the 4th millennium BC.

OLinguists assign a special role in the formation of the reconstructed protoculture to the Anatolian tribes that lived on the territory of Asia Minor in the era of the Hittite kingdom (that is, before the fall of Troy). However, they do not deny that before that the Indo-Europeans could live in other regions.

AToutstanding linguist and ideologist of Eurasianism, Prince. N. Trubetskoy, who was critical of the theory of a single proto-language, used the concept of "Indo-Europeans" (it was born in the offices of scientists of the 19th century) exclusively in a linguistic sense. Under it, he understood not some abstract or historical community of tribes, but people of different times and peoples, speaking different languages ​​of the so-called "Indo-European family".

AT.BUT. Safronov believes that it is hardly possible to speak of the only source of the origin of the white race. Indo-European civilization, in his opinion, developed simultaneously in at least three regions: in Asia Minor, in the Balkans and in Central Europe. Based on the archaeological discoveries of recent decades, Safronov traces the earliest migrations of the Indo-Aryans, Indo-Iranians, Proto-Hittites and Proto-Greeks, starting from the 7th millennium BC.

PThe arrival of the Indo-Europeans to Eastern Europe took place in con. IV - beg. III millennium BC, the allocation of the Slavs proper is hardly earlier than the II millennium BC: nothing is known about any contacts of the Slavs with the Achaean peoples. The first reliable information about the Slavs came to us from Tacitus in the 1st century BC. AD (attempts to find the Slavs among the Scythian tribes named by Herodotus are unconvincing).

ToIndo-Europeans include many ancient and modern peoples: Armenians, Balts, Germans, Greeks, Illyrians, Indians, Iranians, Italics, Celts, Slavs, Tocharians, Thracians, Phrygians, Hittites.

PAt the same time, the Balts include modern Latvians and Lithuanians, as well as the disappeared Prussians and some other ethnic groups, modern Germanic peoples are Austrians, British, Danes, Dutch, Icelanders, Germans, Norwegians, Frisians, Swedes, Faroese, extinct Goths and other disappeared ancient Germanic tribes.

AndPersians, Mazenderans, Gilans, Kurds, Balochs, Ossetians, Tajiks, Pamir Tajiks (Yazgulyams, Rushans, Bartangs, Shughnis, Sarykols, Yazgulyams, Vakhans, Ishkashims, Munjans and Yidga), Talyshs have Ranian origin.

ToThe Italians included the Latins (part of which were the Romans, from whose language Romance languages ​​​​are derived, including Italian, French, Provençal, Romansh, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Romanian, Moldavian), Osci and Umbras.

Pthe descendants of the Celts are the Scots, Irish, Bretons, Welsh, etc.

ToSlavs include modern Belarusians, Bulgarians, Lusatians, Macedonians, Poles, Russians, Serbs, Slovenes, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Croats, Czechs, as well as currently Germanized and Polonized Polabian and Pomeranian Slavs.

Pdescendants of the Illyrians or Thracians, perhaps, are modern Albanians.

Pabout the theory, which, in particular, was supported by S. Starostin, Indo-European languages ​​belong to the macrofamily of Nostratic languages.

MModels of the origin of the Indo-Europeans can be divided into European and Asian. Of the Europeans, the Kurgan hypothesis, the most common among linguists and archaeologists, suggests that the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans was the territory of the Northern Black Sea region between the Dnieper and Volga rivers, and they themselves were a semi-nomadic population of the steppe regions of modern east Ukraine and south Russia, who lived in these places in the V-IV millennium BC e. With the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans, the population belonging to the Sredne Stog, Samara and Yamnaya cultures is usually identified. Later, in connection with the transition of these tribes to the Bronze Age and the domestication of the horse, intensive migrations of Indo-European tribes began in various directions. At the same time, the linguistic assimilation of the local pre-Indo-European population by the Indo-Europeans took place (see Old Europe), which led to the fact that modern speakers of Indo-European languages ​​\u200b\u200bare significantly different in racial and anthropological type.

ATIn the era of the Great Geographical Discoveries and the mass European colonization that followed them, Indo-European languages ​​spread in America, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and other areas, and, due to Russian colonization, significantly expanded their range in Asia (in which before that era there were enough wide).

DOther hypotheses are:

Anatolian (Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson),

Armenian (Anatolian version: Vyach. Vs. Ivanov and T. V. Gamkrelidze),

Balkan (V. A. Safronov),

Indian (supporters of Indian nationalism).

XAlthough at present they are classified as Indo-Europeans on a linguistic basis, 5 thousand years ago it was a group of genetically related peoples. The marker of Indo-European origin, perhaps, is the R1a haplogroup in the Y chromosome in men (however, there are big doubts about this, since according to the Y chromosome mutation rate, the R1a mutation arose more than 10 thousand years ago, which is much earlier than the settlement of the proto- Indo-Europeans).

HThe greatest variability of the R1a marker is found in Eastern Ukraine and Southern Russia, which may indicate the greatest antiquity of its distribution in this region.

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The Indo-European language family is the most widespread in the world. Its related languages ​​are spoken by more than 2.5 billion people. It includes modern Slavic, Romance, Germanic, Celtic, Baltic, Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Armenian, Greek and Albanian language groups.

Many ancient Indo-Europeans (Indo-Iranians, for example) were nomads and could graze their herds over vast areas, passing on their language to local tribes. After all, it is known that the language of nomads often becomes a kind of Koine in the places of their nomads.

Slavic peoples

The largest ethno-linguistic community of Indo-European origin in Europe is the Slavs. Archaeological evidence points to the formation of the early Slavs in the area between the Upper Dniester and the basin of the left tributaries of the Middle Dnieper. In this region, the earliest monuments (III-IV centuries) were found, which were recognized as authentically Slavic. The first references to the Slavs are found in Byzantine sources of the 6th century. Retrospectively, these sources mention the Slavs in the 4th century. When the Proto-Slavic people stood out from the common Indo-European (or intermediate Balto-Slavic) people is not known for certain. According to various sources, this could happen in a very wide time range - from the 2nd millennium BC. until the first centuries A.D. As a result of migrations, wars and other kinds of interactions with neighboring peoples and tribes, the Slavic linguistic community broke up into eastern, western and southern ones. Mostly Eastern Slavs are represented in Russia: Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Rusyns. At the same time, Russians make up the absolute majority of the population of the Russian Federation, Ukrainians are the third largest people in the country.

Eastern Slavs were the main population of medieval Kievan Rus and Ladoga-Novgorod land. On the basis of the East Slavic (Old Russian) nationality by the 17th century. formed the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. The formation of the Belarusian people was completed by the beginning of the 20th century. The question of the status of the Rusyns as a separate people is still controversial. Some researchers (especially in Ukraine) consider Rusyns to be an ethnic group of Ukrainians, and the word "Rusyns" itself is an outdated name for Ukrainians used in Austria-Hungary.

The economic basis on which the East Slavic peoples historically formed and developed over the centuries was agricultural production and trade. In the pre-industrial period, these peoples developed an economic and cultural type, which was dominated by arable agriculture with the cultivation of cereals (rye, barley, oats, wheat). Other economic activities (domestic animal husbandry, beekeeping, gardening, gardening, hunting, fishing, collecting wild plants) were important, but not of paramount importance in ensuring life. Until the 20th century almost everything necessary in the peasant economy of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians was produced independently - from houses to clothes and kitchen utensils. Commodity orientation in the agricultural sector accumulated gradually, and primarily at the expense of landowners. Crafts existed both in the form of ancillary household crafts and in the form of specialized industries (iron-making, blacksmithing, pottery, salt-working, cooperage, charcoal, spinning, weaving, lace, etc.).

A very important element of the economic culture of the East Slavic peoples was traditionally otkhodnichestvo - the earnings of peasants in a foreign land, far from their native village: it could be work in large landowner farms, in craftsmen's artels, in mines, in logging, work as wandering stove-makers, tinkers, tailors and etc. It was from otkhodniks that the human resources of urban industrial production were gradually formed. With the development of capitalism in the late XIX - early XX century. and further, in the process of Soviet industrialization, the outflow of people from the countryside to the city increased, the role of industrial production, non-productive spheres of activity, and the national intelligentsia grew.

The predominant type of traditional dwelling among the Eastern Slavs varied depending on the locality. For Russian, Belorussian, North Ukrainian dwellings, the main material was wood (logs), and the type of building was a log cabin ground five-walled hut. In the north of Russia, log houses were often found: courtyards in which various residential and outbuildings were combined under one roof. The combination of wood and clay is typical for South Russian and Ukrainian rural dwellings. A common type of building was a hut: a mud hut - made of wattle, smeared with clay and whitewashed.

The family structure of the East Slavic peoples until the beginning of the 20th century. characterized by the spread of two types of families - large and small, with a partial predominance of one or the other in different areas in different historical eras. Since the 1930s there is almost universal disintegration of the extended family.

An important element of the social structure of the Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples during their stay in the Russian Empire was the class division. Estates differed in specializations, privileges, duties, property status.

And although in some periods there was a certain inter-class mobility, in the general case, staying in the estate was hereditary and lifelong. Some estates (for example, the Cossacks) became the basis for the emergence of ethnic groups, among which now only the memory of the estate of their ancestors is preserved.

The spiritual life of Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Rusyns is rich and varied. Orthodoxy with elements of folk rituals plays a special role. Catholicism is also widespread (mainly of the Greek rite - among Ukrainians and Rusyns), Protestantism, etc.

The southern Slavs were formed mainly on the Balkan Peninsula, closely interacting with the Roman Byzantines, then with the Turks. The current Bulgarians are the result of a mixture of Slavic and Turkic tribes. The modern South Slavs also include Macedonians, Serbs, Montenegrins, Croats, Bosnians, Slovenes, Gorans.

The religion of the majority of the South Slavs is Orthodoxy. Croats are predominantly Catholic. Most of the Bosnians (Muslims, Bosniaks), Gorani, as well as Pomaks (ethnic group) and Torbeshi Allegory of Russia (ethnic group) are Muslims.

The area of ​​modern residence of the southern Slavs is separated from the main Slavic area by non-Slavic Hungary, Romania and Moldova. In Russia at present (according to the 2002 census), Bulgarians, Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins live from the southern Slavs.

Western Slavs are Kashubians, Lusatian Sorbs, Poles, Slovaks and Czechs. Their homeland is in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and certain regions of Germany. Some linguists also refer to the West Slavic dialect of the Pannonian Rusyns living in the Serbian region of Vojvodina.

The majority of believing Western Slavs are Catholics. There are also Orthodox, Protestants.

Poles, Czechs, Slovaks live in Russia from the Western Slavs. There are quite large Polish communities in the Kaliningrad region, St. Petersburg, Moscow, the Komi Republic, and the Krasnodar Territory.

Armenians and Hemshils

The Armenian language stands apart in the Indo-European family of languages: only it and several of its dialects are included in the Armenian language group. The formation of the Armenian language and, accordingly, the Armenian people, took place in the 9th-6th centuries. BC. within the state of Urartu.

The Armenian language is spoken in Russia by two peoples: the Armenians and the kindred Hemshils (Hamshens). The latter come from the Armenian city of Hamshen (Khemshin) in the Pontic Mountains.

Hemshils are often called Muslim Armenians, but the northern Hamshens, who settled in the territory of the present Krasnodar Territory and Adygea before the Islamization of their fellow tribesmen, belong, like most Armenians, to the Christian (pre-Chalcedonian) Armenian Apostolic Church. The rest of the Hemshils are Sunni Muslims. There are Catholics among the Armenians.

Germanic peoples

The peoples of the Germanic language group in Russia include Germans, Jews (conditionally) and Englishmen. Inside the West German area in the 1st century. AD three groups of tribal dialects were distinguished: Ingveon, Istveon and Erminon. Migration in the V-VI centuries. parts of the Ingvaeonic tribes to the British Isles predetermined the further development of the English language.

German dialects continued to form on the continent. The formation of literary languages ​​was completed in England in the 16th–17th centuries, in Germany in the 18th century. The emergence of the American version of the English language is associated with the colonization of North America. Yiddish originated as the language of Ashkenazi Jews in Central and Eastern Europe in the 10th-14th centuries. based on Middle German dialects with extensive borrowings from Hebrew, Aramaic, as well as from Romance and Slavic languages.

Religiously, Protestants and Catholics predominate among Russian Germans. Most Jews are Judaists.

Iranian peoples

The Iranian group includes at least thirty languages ​​spoken by dozens of peoples. At least eleven Iranian peoples are represented in Russia. All the languages ​​of the Iranian group in one way or another go back to the ancient Iranian language or a group of dialects spoken by the Prairanian tribes. About 3–2.5 thousand years BC dialects of the Iranian branch began to separate from the common Indo-Iranian root. The pra-Iranians in the era of pan-Iranian unity lived in the space from modern Iran to, probably, the south and southeast of the present European part of Russia. So, the Scythians, Sarmatians and Alans spoke the Iranian languages ​​of the Scythian-Sarmatian group. Today, the only living language of the Scythian subgroup is spoken by the Ossetians. This language has retained certain features of the ancient Iranian dialects. The Persian and Tajik languages ​​belong to the Persian-Tajik subgroup proper. Kurdish language and Kurmanji (Yazidi language) - to the Kurdish subgroup. Pashto - the language of the Pashtun Afghans - is closer to the Indian languages. The Tats language and the Dzhugurdi language (a dialect of Mountain Jews) are very similar to each other. In the process of formation, they were significantly influenced by the Kumyk and Azerbaijani languages. The Talysh language was also influenced by Azerbaijani. Actually, the Talysh language goes back to Azeri - the Iranian language, which was spoken in Azerbaijan before its capture by the Seljuk Turks, after which most of the Azerbaijanis switched to the Turkic language, which is now called Azerbaijani.

There is almost no need to talk about common features in the traditional economic complex, customs and spiritual life of different Iranian peoples: they have been living far from each other for too long, they have experienced too many very different influences.

Romance peoples

The Romance languages ​​are called so because they go back to Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. Of the Romance languages ​​in Russia, the most widespread is Romanian, or rather, its Moldavian dialect, which is considered an independent language. Romanian is the language of the inhabitants of ancient Dacia, on the lands of which modern Romania and Moldova are located. Before the Romanization of Dacia, tribes of the Getae, Dacians, and Illyrians lived there. Then for 175 years this area was under Roman rule and was subjected to intensive colonization. The Romans went there from all over the empire: someone dreamed of retiring and occupying free lands, someone was sent to Dacia as an exile - away from Rome. Soon, almost all of Dacia spoke the local vernacular Latin. But from the seventh century most of the Balkan Peninsula is occupied by the Slavs, and for the Vlachs, the ancestors of the Romanians and Moldavians, the period of Slavic-Romance bilingualism begins. Under the influence of the Bulgarian kingdom, the Vlachs adopted Old Church Slavonic as their main written language and used it until the 16th century, when the proper Romanian writing finally appeared based on the Cyrillic alphabet. The Romanian alphabet based on the Latin alphabet was introduced only in 1860.

Residents of Bessarabia, which was part of the Russian Empire, continued to write in Cyrillic. Until the end of the XX century. the Moldavian language was strongly influenced by Russian.

The main traditional occupations of Moldovans and Romanians - until the 19th century. cattle breeding, then arable farming (corn, wheat, barley), viticulture and winemaking. Believing Moldovans and Romanians are mostly Orthodox. There are Catholics and Protestants.

The homeland of other Romance-speaking peoples, whose representatives are found in Russia, is far abroad. Spanish (also called Castilian) is spoken by the Spaniards and Cubans, French by the French, and Italian by the Italians. Spanish, French and Italian were formed on the basis of vernacular Latin in Western Europe. In Cuba (as in other countries of Latin America), the Spanish language was entrenched in the process of Spanish colonization. Most of the believers among the representatives of these peoples are Catholics.

Indo-Aryan peoples

Indo-Aryan is a language that goes back to ancient Indian. Most of these are the languages ​​of the peoples of Hindustan. The so-called Chib novels, the language of Western gypsies, also belong to this group of languages. Gypsies (Roma) are natives of India, but their language developed in isolation from the main Indo-Aryan area and today differs significantly from the Hindustani languages ​​proper. In terms of their way of life, the gypsies are closer not to their linguistically related Indians, but rather to the Central Asian gypsies. The latter include the ethnic groups Lyuli (Jugi, Mugat), Sogutarosh, Parya, Chistoni and Kavol. They speak dialects of Tajik in half with "lavzi mugat" (a special slang based on Arabic and Uzbek languages ​​interspersed with Indo-Aryan vocabulary). The Parya group, in addition, retains its own Indo-Aryan language for internal communication, which differs significantly from both the Hindustani languages ​​and the Gypsy. Historical data suggests that the Lyuli probably came to Central Asia and Persia from India during the time of Tamerlane or earlier. Part of the Lyuli moved directly to Russia in the 1990s. Western gypsies from India ended up in Egypt, then for a long time were subjects of Byzantium and lived in the Balkans, and came to Russia in the 16th century. through Moldova, Romania, Germany and Poland. Roma, Lyuli, Sogutarosh, Parya, Chistoni and Kavol do not consider each other to be kindred peoples.

Greeks

A separate group within the Indo-European family is the Greek language, it is spoken by the Greeks, but conditionally the Greek group also includes the Pontic Greeks, many of whom are Russian-speaking, and the Azov and Tsalk Greeks-Urums, who speak the languages ​​of the Turkic group. The heirs of the great ancient civilization and the Byzantine Empire, the Greeks got into the Russian Empire in different ways. Some of them are the descendants of the Byzantine colonists, others emigrated to Russia from the Ottoman Empire (this emigration was almost continuous from the 17th to the 19th centuries), others became Russian subjects when some lands that previously belonged to Turkey went to Russia.

Baltic peoples

The Baltic (Letto-Lithuanian) group of Indo-European languages ​​is related to Slavic and at one time, probably, was a Balto-Slavic unity with it. There are two living Baltic languages: Latvian (with a Latgalian dialect) and Lithuanian. Differentiation between the Lithuanian and Latvian languages ​​began in the 9th century, however, they remained dialects of the same language for a long time. Transitional dialects existed at least until the 14th-15th centuries. Latvians migrated to Russian lands for a long time, fleeing the German feudal lords. From 1722 Latvia was part of the Russian Empire. From 1722 to 1915, Lithuania was also part of Russia. From 1940 to 1991, both of these territories were part of the USSR.