<Tr> <Th> Glottolog </Th> <Td> slav1255 </Td> </Tr> <Tr> <Td_colspan="2"> Worldwide distribution of Slavic languages . Note that Russia is not shown here in its entirety . </Td> </Tr> <P> The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages) are the Indo - European languages native to the Slavic peoples, originally from Eastern Europe . They are thought to descend from a proto - language called Proto - Slavic spoken during the Early Middle Ages, which in turn is thought to have descended from the earlier Proto - Balto - Slavic language, linking the Slavic languages to the Baltic languages in a Balto - Slavic group within the Indo - European family . </P> <P> The Slavic languages are divided intro three subgroups: East, West, and South, which together constitute more than twenty languages . Of these, ten have at least one million speakers and official status as the national languages of the countries in which they are predominantly spoken: Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian (of the East group), Polish, Czech and Slovak (of the West group) and Slovene, Serbo - Croatian, Macedonian and Bulgarian (of the South group). </P>

From which language family did the russian language descend