The scope of the course:

* Indo-Europeans: the people and their language
* The place of Slavic within Indo-European (relationships to other subgroups)
* The development of modern Slavic languages from the ancestral Common Slavic
* The development of writing systems, national languages, and literatures
* Principles of historical linguistics
* The relevance of historical linguistics: how it furthers our knowledge of the past, human cognitive development, culture of our ancestors, etc.

After this course you will know:

* lots of fun trivia to dazzle your friends with
* basic principles of language change
* the main features of all Slavic languages
* how and why individual Slavic languages differ and how and why they are alike.
* how to recognize different writing systems.