The rest were swarthy, unwashed seamen who swore in Slavic tongues and spent a lot of time glaring sullenly at the passengers, who either ignored them or lectured them on the evils of eating beef.

With the gradual decline of the use of these local Slavic tongues, the term Wends slowly disappeared, too.

As the Sorbs see it, their Slavic tongue and the history and geography of the region make the community of 68,000 Sorbs a natural bridge between Germany and a revived Eastern Europe.

Eventually those who had defeated the Germans arrived and spoke in the coarse Slavic tongue, familiar from school days, which he had learned to fear even more than German.

He added something in a rasping, Slavic tongue, and the two men with him came in and shut the door, taking up positions on either side of it.

Albanian is not a Slavic tongue nor does it have recognizable links to any other European language.

The institute was set up as a research center for the study of contemporary Jewish culture and Yiddish, the everyday language of European Jewry that borrowed heavily from the Germanic and Slavic tongues.

However, in isolated rural areas where Wends formed a substantial part of the population, they continued to use Slavic tongues and kept elements of local Wendish culture despite a strong German influx.

Lachley was not Hungarian by birth, but he knew the Slavic tongues and more importantly, their legends and myths, had studied them almost since boyhood.

There were words in it; they didn't sound like her own strange Slavic tongue, rolling and rounded rather than sibilant, more like a sonorous Italian or Latin.