The Western world, also known as the West, primarily refers to the various nations and states in the regions of Europe, North America, and Oceania. The Western world is also known as the Occident (from the Latin word occidēns "setting down, sunset, west") in contrast to the Eastern world known as the Orient (from the Latin word oriēns "origin, sunrise, east").

The South Slavic languages are one of three branches of the Slavic languages.There are approximately 30 million speakers, mainly in the Balkans.These are separated geographically from speakers of the other two Slavic branches (West and East) by a belt of German, Hungarian and Romanian speakers.

Slavic languages, also called Slavonic languages, group of Indo-European languages spoken in most of eastern Europe, much of the Balkans, parts of central Europe, and the northern part of Asia. The Slavic languages, spoken by some 315 million people at the turn of the 21st century, are most closely related to the languages of the Baltic group (Lithuanian, Latvian, and the now …

The Sorbian languages (Upper Sorbian: serbska rěč, Lower Sorbian: serbska rěc) are the Upper Sorbian language and Lower Sorbian language, two closely related and partially mutually intelligible languages spoken by the Sorbs, a West Slavic minority in the Lusatia region of eastern Germany.They are classified under the West Slavic branch of the Indo-European …

The West Slavs are Slavic peoples who speak the West Slavic languages. They separated from the common Slavic group around the 7th century, and established independent polities in Central Europe by the 8th to 9th centuries. The West Slavic languages diversified into their historically attested forms over the 10th to 14th centuries. Today, groups which speak West …

A pan-Slavic language is a zonal auxiliary language for communication among the Slavic peoples.. There are approximately 400 million speakers of the Slavic languages.In order to communicate with each other, speakers of different Slavic languages often resort to international lingua francas, primarily English, or Russian in East Slavic zonal cases. But since Slavic …

Since the interwar period, scholars have conventionally divided Slavic languages, on the basis of geographical and genealogical principle, and with the use of the extralinguistic feature of script, into three main branches, that is, East, South, and West (from the vantage of linguistic features alone, there are only two branches of the Slavic languages, namely North and South).

The East Slavic languages constitute one of three regional subgroups of the Slavic languages, however, by number of speakers, East Slavic languages far outnumber the West Slavic and South Slavic language families. These languages are currently spoken natively throughout Eastern Europe, and eastwards to Siberia and the Russian Far East, while being also spoken …

The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa.The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers. All Germanic languages are derived …

In West Slavic countries, as well as in Belarus, fermented cereals, such as rye, wheat, or oatmeal, are used to make soups.In Poland and parts of Belarus, rye is traditional for making żur; a variant made with wheat flour instead of rye is known in Poland as barszcz biały ("white borscht"). Fermented oatmeal is a common ingredient in Belarus and in some regions of Poland.