ABSTRACT
Since earliest times the Balkans has had a rich cultural mix, a complex pattern of ethnic settlement and a volatile tribal mentality. The ancestors of the South Slavs arrived in the Balkans, probably from the southern Ukraine, in the sixth and seventh centuries. As they did, the major linguistic divisions in the Southern Slavonic language group emerged. South-Eastern Slavonic would develop into Bulgarian and Macedonian, while South-Western Slavonic would be the basis of Slovene and the range of accents and dialects that would eventually be known as Serbo-Croat (Comrie 1990). The Croats accepted Catholicism, but Serbia and Montenegro accepted Orthodox Christianity and the Cyrillic alphabet from the Greeks.
