Which language is closest to Proto Slavic?

Old Church Slavonic
The language closest to Proto-Slavic is Old Church Slavonic (abbreviated to OCS). OCS is considered the first literary Slavic language and was based on the Slavic dialects of the Thesalonike area. It was probably intelligible across the entire area populated by Slavs, that is until the 10th century.

How close are Ukrainian and Russian languages?

These two languages only share about 60 percent of the same vocabulary. In fact, Ukranian is closer to Belarusian than it is to Russia concerning vocabulary. In other words, there is a greater difference between Russian and Ukrainian in terms of vocabulary than there is between most of the Romance languages.

What is the origin of the East Slavic languages?

The existing East Slavic languages are Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian; Rusyn is considered to be either a separate language or a dialect of Ukrainian. The East Slavic languages descend from a common predecessor, the language of the medieval Kievan Rus’ (9th to 13th centuries).

What is the most widely spoken Slavic language?

It is the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, with 144 million speakers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers and the seventh by total number of speakers. The language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

What language family does the Russian language belong to?

It is a part of the Indo-European language family, and is one of four living East Slavic languages, and also part of the larger Balto-Slavic branch.

What is the difference between Bulgarian and Church Slavic?

The Church Slavonic language was strictly used only in text, while the colloquial language of the Bulgarians was communicated in its spoken form.