2.2.1 J. Kopitar

The Slovene linguist and Imperial Austrian censor JernejFootnote ⁵ Kopitar is generally credited with the first observation pointing clearly in the direction of the development of Balkan linguistics. Kopitar 1829 begins with Thunmann’s observations, then surveys the sources available on Albanian (Albanesische), Balkan Romance (Walachische – north of the Danube and in Macedonia), and Balkan Slavic (what he calls Bulgarische). This is followed by a discussion of Romanian Cyrillic and Latin orthographies. He then turns to the question of why Walachische differs so much from the other Romance languages and concludes that while the Western European Romance languages were subject to the relative homogeneity of Germanic influence – he claims that they adopted the preposed definite article based on the German (and Greek) model and have more or less German syntax – Walachische is basically Vulgar Latin lexicon (material) superposed on Thracian grammar (form), while Illyrian (Albanian) kept both form and material (Kopitar 1829: 85). The only illustrative item that he cites is the postposed definite article. Observing that postposed articles also occur in Basque and Scandinavian, Kopitar 1829: 86 argues that the similarities between the two “fraternal and neighboring peoples” (Bruder- und Nachbarvölkern), i.e., Albanian and Balkan Romance, are in their total grammatical structure. And this form was so indestructible (unvertilgbar) that it also affected Balkan Slavic, which, under the influence of Balkan Romance, replaced the Slavic case inflections with the postposed definite article. At this point Kopitar 1829: 86 makes his oft-quoted formulation, cited at length in Sandfeld 1930: 11 and briefly in many sources (e.g., Asenova 2002: 7–8; Feuillet 1986: 7; also Friedman 1997a) and worth reproducing here:

This is followed by some examples, e.g., Latin homo and ‘Western Romance’ el hom (“after German der mensch with the article preposed”) compared with om ~ omlu in Macedonia (Aromanian), omul in Dacia (Romanian), tschovek ~ tschoveko or tschovekot in Bulgarisch (Balkan Slavic), and Albanian njerí ~ njeríu. There follows a discussion of vocabulary and nine Balkan Romance sound changes (rhotacism, various palatalizations and affrications, and changes of velars to labials) compared with Greek, Slavic, and Western Romance. Then, restating his characterization of Albanian, Balkan Romance, and Balkan Slavic (p. 95) as:

Kopitar (loc. cit.) gives a translation of the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15: 11–32) in Serbian, in what he calls Bulgarisch (“Bulgarian,” but actually the Razlog dialect of Macedonian), in Romanian – the same text in both Cyrillic and Latin transcriptions – what he calls Macedo-Walachisch, and in Albanian (Tosk). His purpose in including the Serbian is to make that much clearer the Slavic character of the Serbian and the Balkan (or Balkan Romance) character of the “Bulgarian.” After a series of comments on the Albanian lexicon, Kopitar ends by noting that beside the postposed article, the replacement of infinitive by subjunctive and the formation of the future by means of ‘want,’ which also spread to Greek and Serbian, and the construction Alb [janë] të tutë = Rmn ale tale [sûnt] ‘[they are] yours’ ([sind] die deinigen) are shared grammatical features. Although not an explicit theory of Balkan linguistics, Kopitar’s formulation is nonetheless the terminus a quo of the field, insofar as it is the first statement to point explicitly to the grammatical commonalties that as such are the key to the concept of areal linguistics, as opposed to typological or genetic linguistics (cf. Hamp 1977a; J. Greenberg 1957; Jakobson 1958/1962).

2.2.2 A. Schleicher

August Schleicher, the founder of the Stammbaum ‘stem tree’ (i.e., ‘family tree’) theory of genetic or genealogical linguistic relationships, which treated languages as living organisms and their relationships as biological lines of descent, also commented on the same languages as Kopitar, and like him, placed special emphasis on the postposed definite article (Schleicher 1850: 143):

On the basis of this statement, Simpson 1994: 210 credits Schleicher with being the first to recognize the Balkan languages as constituting a sprachbund, but as Kruse 2000/2002: 4.3.2 observes, it is unclear whether or not Schleicher views this “corruption” as “infectious” or mere coincidence. And even if we credit Schleicher with attributing the “degrees” of “corruption” to an unspecified and untheorized substratum, the formulation does not really differ significantly from Kopitar’s areal presentation except in its ideology (Bauman & Briggs 2003: 1–18, 97–225).

2.2.3 F. Miklosich and H. Schuchardt

The next significant figure in the history of Balkan linguistics is another Slovene linguist and Slavist, Franz Miklosich, who, among many honors, held the first chair in Slavic Philology at the University of Vienna. Miklosich 1862: 4 refers approvingly to Kopitar’s 1829 explanation for the similarities of the Balkan languages and expands on the number of features he identifies as resulting from the contact-induced restructuring on the basis of a substratum. For the most part, Miklosich’s additions were phonological, but in terms of morphosyntax, we give here his list of features (1862: 6–8) and the languages as he cited them with references to the relevant sections of our work:

1. (1) future with ‘want’ + infinitive: Serbian, Bulgarian, Modern Greek, Tosk Albanian, whereas Geg has the Romance type with ‘have’Footnote ⁶ [§6.2.4.1]

2. (2) lack of infinitive, with replacement by a finite verb plus a conjunction: Bulgarian, Modern Greek, Albanian, often in Serbian; Romanian has both modes of expressionFootnote ⁷ [§7.7.2.1]

3. (3) merger of genitive and dative: Bulgarian, Romanian, Modern Greek, Albanian [§6.1.1.2]

4. (4) the un-Romance postposing of the definite article: Bulgarian, Romanian, Albanian [§6.1.2.2.1]

5. (5) the “prominence” of schwa (Bulgarian, Romanian, Albanian), including reduction of unstressed a to schwa [§5.4.1.6]

6. (6) nasal anlaut (i.e., as syllable onsets before stops in clusters),Footnote ⁸ also loss of l before i: Romanian, Albanian; also št as a common combination: Romanian, Albanian, Bulgarian [§5.4.4.1, §5.4.4.8, §5.4.4.5]

7. (7) interchange of /n/ and /r/: Romanian, Albanian [§3.2.2.7, §5.4.4.10.5]

Of lesser importance for Miklosich among phonological features, but noted nonetheless, were:

1. (a) /r/ for /l/: Romanian, Modern Greek, Albanian, and occasionally in Bulgarian [§5.4.4.9.1]

2. (b) raising of unaccented /o/ to /u/: Bulgarian, Romanian, Albanian [§5.4.1.5]

3. (c) ea > e when followed by front vowel: Bulgarian, RomanianFootnote ⁹ [§5.4.3.7]

Finally, he added two morphosyntactic phenomena:

1. (8.1) doubled object pronouns: Bulgarian, Romanian, Modern Greek, Albanian [§7.5.1]

2. (8.2) formation of teens with ‘ten’ and the digits with an intervening preposition: Bulgarian, Romanian, Albanian [§4.3.2.2]

His other observations are connected with the lexicon. It is worth noting here that in contradistinction to earlier work, Miklosich accords more attention to Greek, while mentioning Serbian.

German linguist Hugo Schuchardt introduced the Wellentheorie ‘wave theory’ (Schuchardt 1868: 49; Alvar 1967: 82–85, as cited in Campbell 1998: 189).Footnote ¹⁰ He added two items to Miklosich’s list, namely the change of velar to labial before dental (Latin luctus > Romanian luptă, Albanian luftë ‘war’) and the Romanian 1sg am ‘I have’ as corresponding to Albanian kam ‘idem.’Footnote ¹¹ Other linguists of this period accepted Miklosich’s formulation; see Meillet 1921; Bartoli 1906; Hasdeu 1886; and Weigand 1888.

2.2.4 Data Gathering

From the point of view of Balkan linguistics, the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century are characterized by classic works relating to specific Balkan languages or specific aspects of individual or pairs of Balkan languages. A complete list of works would require a separate volume, so we restrict ourselves to a few of the most important authors and works published between the landmarks Miklosich 1862 and Sandfeld 1930 as well as some bibliographies with additional references for this period and beyond. Some significant language-specific works from the period after 1930 are also included here.

For Albanian we can note studies by Hahn 1854; Jokl 1911, 1923; Meyer 1883, 1884, 1892, 1896, 1897; and Miklosich 1870, 1871ab;Footnote ¹² grammars/chrestomathies by Dozon 1879; Kristoforidhi 1882; Lambertz & Pekmezi 1913; Leotti 1916; Meyer 1888b; Pedersen 1895b; and Pekmezi 1908; dictionaries by Bashkimi 1908; Kristoforidhi 1904; and Meyer 1891. The bibliography by Hamp 1972a is thorough for the period covered, and Hetzer & Roman 1983: 117–138 provides some additional material. Kastrati 1980 surveys grammars of Albanian 1635–1944, and Ismajli 1982 is a critical edition of the oldest Albanian grammar.

For Balkan Romance, the bibliography in Cazacu 1972 is stronger on post-World War Two work but still useful. Studies, grammars, and descriptions include Capidan 1908, 1925ab, 1928, 1932, 1935; Densusianu 1901; Gamillscheg 1919; Papahagi 1902; Tiktin 1905; Wace & Thompson 1914; Weigand 1888, 1892, 1894–1895; for dictionaries, many of them etymological, there are the works by Cihac 1870, 1879; Dalametra 1906; Tiktin 1903–1925; Paşcu 1925; and Puşcariu 1905 as well as the dialect atlas by Weigand 1909.

For Balkan Slavic, the dialect descriptions by A. Belić 1905; Broch 1903; and Rešetar 1907 are fundamental for Torlak and Stevanovič 1935 and Miletić 1940 are contributions to southern Montegrin (Zeta-Lovćen). For Bulgarian we have the historical, analytical, and dialectological work of Conev 1934, 1937, 1940; Meyer 1920; Miletič 1903, 1912; S. Mladenov 1929, 1935; and Todorov 1936, as well as the dictionary of Gerov 1895–1908. We can also mention here Weigand’s 1917 grammar as well as Părvev’s 1975 detailed survey of the history of Bulgarian grammatical description. For Macedonian dialectology, the fundamental works of this period are A. Belić 1935; Ivanov 1932; Małecki 1934–1936; Mazon 1923, 1936; Mazon & Vaillant 1938; Oblak 1896; and Seliščev 1918, 1929, 1931. The bibliography by Stankiewicz & Worth 1966–1970 is especially useful for this period.

For Greek grammar, the chief works of this period are Chatzidakis 1892; Mirambel 1929; Psicharis 1885, 1929; Thumb 1912; for dialectology we have Dawkins 1940; Dieterich 1908; Heisenberg 1918; Høeg 1925–1926; Thumb 1893; we can also mention here Dawkins 1916, 1937 for Asia Minor Greek and Deffner 1881 for Tsakonian. Meyer 1894 and Murnu 1902 treat loanwords. The relevant bibliographies are by Swanson 1960 and Householder & Nagy 1972.

For Turkish, the grammar by Deny 1921 is the classic pre-reform account of Ottoman Turkish. Redhouse 1890 is the edition that is the basis of what is still the best Turkish–English dictionary: Redhouse 1968; this dictionary has been through numerous reprintings, and supplements have also been published, but for our purposes here this classic edition is still the best. For Turkish lexicon in its Balkan context, Haşdeu 1886; Lokotsch 1927; Meyer 1893; and Miklosich 1884–1890, 1889, 1890 are the major works of the period. The bibliographies by Gülensoy 1981 and Tryjarski 1990 as well as that in Friedman 2003a cover the Balkan Turkish dialects (and see also Johanson 2021: passim).

For the dialects of Romani spoken in the Balkans, Miklosich 1872–1880, 1874–1878; Paspati 1863, 1870; and Pott 1844–1845, are the classic works, and Gilliat-Smith 1915/1916 is an important early dialect classification. Đorđević 1907 can also be mentioned. The bibliography by Bakker & Matras 2003 is an excellent resource.

For Judezmo there are dialect descriptions by Walter 1920; Wagner 1914, 1923, 1925, 1930; Luria 1930; and Crews 1935, and the bibliographies by Studemund 1975 and Sala 1976 as well as Bunis 1975 and the atlas by Quintana Rodríguez 2006.

We can also mention here Horecky 1969, which contains some relevant references to the period, and Schaller 1977, which is really much stronger for the mid-twentieth century than for the time addressed in this section.

Also during this period, the Vienna Academy of Sciences began its series Schriften der Balkankommission (from 1900 for the linguistische Abteilung), which produced numerous monographs on various Balkan languages and dialects and continues to do so to this day. We can also mention here the Jahresbericht des Instituts für rumänische Sprache zu Leipzig (1894–1921), then Balkan-Arhiv (1925–1928 and 1976– [new series]). It is not coincidental that a rise in state-sponsored studies of the Balkan languages coincided with Great Power interests in the region. Thus, for example, Wilkinson 1951: 327 notes: “During the War of 1914–1918 [G. Weigand] was commissioned by the German General Staff to enquire into the ethnography of Macedonia. Every facility was granted to him to carry out his task. He was given a staff of six Germans and a number of Bulgarians, but no Serbians served with him for obvious reasons – Serbia was the enemy. His inquiries did not extend into Greek Macedonia as the Germans and Bulgarians were not in occupation of that territory. […] The work was never officially published, but Weigand summarized his ideas in a book published in 1924.”Footnote ¹³ See also Axel 2001: 15–21 on the relationship between anthropology and political agendas. Only two works from this time, however, attempted a comparison of all the Balkan languages, both of them doctoral dissertations, Papahagi 1908 and Sandfeld 1900, an excerpt of which appeared as Sandfeld 1902; the former treated parallel phraseology (also Sandfeld 1912), while the excerpt of the latter discussed the replacement of the infinitive. We can also note Michov 1908, which discussed the definite article in Albanian, Romanian, and Bulgarian, and Gilliat-Smith 1915/1916, which noted the commonalities among Albanian, Balkan Armenian, Balkan Romance, Balkan Slavic, Greek, and Romani. This period also saw the start of a number of language-specific journals and dialect series, as well as the publication of folklore collections that served as the basis for Sandfeld 1930 and others.

2.3.1 N. Trubetzkoy and R. Jakobson

Trubetzkoy 1923 contains the first theoretical formulation of the concept of a sprachbund (French union linguistique, Russian jazykovoj sojuz, English linguistic league). Owing to both the obscurity of the original publication and the lesser frequency of knowledge of Russian in Western Europe, Trubetzkoy’s 1930 restatement at the First International Congress of Linguists is better known and more often cited. In his original article, having discussed the classical Stammbaum presentation of languages as families, branches, languages, and dialects (and, we can add, having observed that in the case of transitional dialects the means of linguistic science alone are often unable to resolve a quarrel over which language can claim the given dialect), Trubetzkoy 1923 remarks that languages in a given geographic and cultural-historical region can form a group whose resemblances are not due to common ancestry but rather prolonged contact and parallel (i.e., convergent) development. He suggests the term jazykovoj sojuz ‘language union’ for such groups, and, in a footnote, adduces the Balkan languages – which he specifies as Bulgarian, Romanian, Albanian, and Modern Greek – as exemplary owing to the common traits in their grammatical structures. He then goes on to suggest that such unions exist not only at the level of language, but also at the level of family, thus anticipating Jakobson’s discussion (see Jakobson 1931a/1962, 1931b/1962, 1938/1962) of phonological affinities, but also such problems as Altaic (see Johanson 2006; cf. also Masica 2001; Nichols 1992). Trubetzkoy 1930 was published as proposition 16 in answer to general theme II: “Etablissement et délimitation des termes techniques. Quelle est la traduction exacte des termes techniques dans les différents langages (français, anglais, allemand)?” (‘Establishment and delimitation of technical terms. What is the precise translation of technical terms in different languages (French, English, German)?’). The formulation is of sufficient importance to be cited here in its entirety (italics as in the original):

Again, it is worth noting here both the inclusion of Modern Greek in the sprachbund and the exclusion of Serbo-Croatian. These are questions already implicit in Kopitar 1829 and ones that will arise repeatedly. Also worth noting are Trubetzkoy’s specification of “historical-cultural” in addition to “geographic” in 1923 and Kulturwörter in 1930. Although Masica 2001: 239 cautions against confusing “recent political configurations” with linguistic areas, nonetheless, in the case of the Balkans (and elsewhere) it is precisely such social factors as the political that create the conditions for convergence. Trubetzkoy’s formulation of “belonging” to a sprachbund in the same sense as “belonging” to a linguistic family will prove to be problematic (see §2.5.3 and especially Weinreich 1958), but even from the earliest days, the positions of Serbian (or Serbo-Croatian) and Greek were labile (cf. Masica 2001: 241, cited in Footnote Chapter 1, footnote 11).

Jakobson’s discussion of phonological sprachbunds and the Eurasian sprachbund (see Jakobson 1931a/1962, 1931b/1962, 1938/1962) concentrates on consonantal timbre (basically palatalization including some correlations with front/back vowel harmony), prosody (presence vs. absence of pitch accent or tone), and, in a footnote to Jakobson 1931b/1962: 191, nominal declension. He sets up Eurasia as the center in terms of all these. For nominal declension, Germano-Romance Europe and South and Southeast Asia are the peripheries, in terms of phonological tone, the Baltic and Pacific areas are the peripheries (with West South Slavic [most of Serbo-Croatian and Slovene] as a relic island), while for palatalization the core is roughly the boundaries of the Russian Empire, with the inclusion of eastern Bulgaria.Footnote ¹⁵ He even goes so far as to suggest that palatalization in Great Russian [sic] finds its most complete expression, and it is thus no coincidence that Great Russian is the basis of the Russian literary language, i.e., the language with a pan-Eurasian cultural mission (Jakobson 1931b/1962: 191).Footnote ¹⁶ It is worth noting, however, that in his formulation of the definition of sprachbund, in which he cites Trubetzkoy’s, Jakobson 1931b/1962: 145 also makes it clear that a sprachbund consists of “dvuh ili neskol’kih” (‘two or several’) languages in contact. The point is that the convergent processes that define a sprachbund are of the same type regardless of whether two or more than two languages are affected.Footnote ¹⁷

We return to the problems of phonology and sprachbunds in Chapters 3 and 5.

2.3.2 A. Seliščev and Kr. Sandfeld

We turn now to two key figures in specifically Balkan studies in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the Russian linguist Afanasiy Seliščev and the Danish linguist Kristian Sandfeld.

2.3.3 Between Linguistique balkanique and Balkansko ezikoznanie

From the epochal publication of Sandfeld 1930 until the late 1950s and early 1960s, the study of Balkan linguistics went through a period of slow growth. This is not to say that there was no scholarly activity. P. Skok and M. Budimir’s interdisciplinary but short-lived Révue internationale des études balkaniques (Belgrade 1934–1938), which set as the goal of Balkan linguistics not only the identification of influences of individual Balkan languages but also the establishment of those Balkanisms characteristic of the sprachbund (Skok & Budimir 1935: 15), published a number of important articles (e.g., Skok 1935; Anagnostopoulos 1935; A. Belić 1936). Collections such as the festschrifts for A. Teodorov-Balan (Dimitrov 1955) and I. Iordan (Cazacu 1958) also contained seminal works by important scholars such as V. Georgiev 1955, A. Graur 1955, M. Caragiu-Marioţeanu 1958, and scholars such as Małecki (e.g., 1935) and Gołąb (e.g., 1956), as well as many others produced important work both before and, especially, after World War Two. (See Asenova 1979 and Schaller 1999 for a more detailed review of the field and Schaller 1977 for additional bibliography.) It was during this period that Latin joined Greek as the sought-after source of Balkan convergence phenomena (e.g., Gołąb 1956).

Not long before Gołąb’s 1956 identification of the isogrammatism (see §6.2.3.2.1), Uriel Weinreich in 1953 published the book that grew out of his master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation and became a seminal work: Languages in Contact (second edition, 1968). Curiously enough, however, the Balkans are almost completely ignored in Weinreich’s classic. Aside from passing mentions of Romanian codeswitching and loanwords (Weinreich 1968: 74, 82) – neither of them in a Balkan context – the citation of Capidan’s 1925b: 159 account of Meglenoromanian borrowing its first and second person singular markers from Macedonian (Weinreich 1968: 31–32; but see §2.5.3 below),Footnote ²⁵ and a garbled account of borrowing from Greek into Turkish,Footnote ²⁶ the only passage connected with the Balkans is the following, at the end of the study (Weinreich 1968: 113):

A footnote refers to Skok and Budimir’s journal, Sandfeld’s “celebrated works,” and a few other items. Although Weinreich’s reference to the Balkans occurred in a closing section entitled Multiple Language Contacts as a Favorable Field of Study, Balkan linguistics continued to develop as a discipline referred to but not investigated in what became the field of contact linguistics, a field for which Weinreich 1953 is in a position in some ways comparable to that of Miklosich 1862 for Balkan linguistics.

It was also during the 1950s that Balkan national linguistic journals such as Makedonski jazik ([North] Macedonia, 1950–), Izvestija na Instituta za bălgarski ezik (Bulgaria, 1951–), Studime filologjike (Albania, 1957/1963–), Studii şi Cercetări lingvistice (Romania, 1950–), and others, began publication. While these journals are not specifically aimed at problems of Balkan linguistics, many prominent Balkanists have published in them, and a number of their articles either have addressed such problems or supplied information for those who have done so. Similarly, university and academy yearbooks, journals, and series, e.g., the series of seven B.A. theses (Diplomni raboti) published by the University of Skopje, published works of direct or indirect relevance to Balkan linguistics.

Nonetheless, compared with the explosive growth from the 1960s onward, the decades from 1930–1959 are marked by a much lower rate of productivity. If we take a representative sample of the literature in or relevant to Balkan linguistics between 1930 and 1960, e.g., the bibliography in Asenova 2002: 334–370, we note that the decade 1950–1959 produced about twice as many works as that of 1930–1939, and moreover three-quarters of the 1950s’ production occurred during the second half of the decade.Footnote ²⁸ Furthermore, all those works taken together account for about a tenth of the works cited, the overwhelming majority having been produced during the subsequent decades.

2.5.1 Roms, Jews, and Turks

As already indicated in the Introduction and Chapter 1, Romani (§1.2.3.5), Jewish languages (especially Judezmo), and Balkan Turkic have been excluded from the gaze of Balkan linguistics, either implicitly or – especially during the modern period – explicitly. Weigand’s 1895: 78 passing observation that in central Albania many nomadic Roms spoke Romani as their mother tongue while sedentary Roms knew all the Balkan languages in addition to Romani (emphasis added) by its very phrasing excludes Romani from the Balkan languages.Footnote ³⁹ Sandfeld 1930: 3–4 mentioned Romani and Judezmo in his second footnote for the purpose of excluding them from his study. However, Gilliat-Smith 1915/1916: 68–69 observed that Romani could supply examples for most of Papahagi’s 1908 work on Balkan phraseological parallels. Moreover, he (correctly) speculated that Armenian could also be involved.

Turkish has always been kept on the sidelines (as an adstrate) contributing vocabulary, some phraseology and calques, and at most perhaps a verbal category here or a bit of word order there (Friedman 1999d, 2003a: 1–29).Footnote ⁴⁰ It has been studied in a Balkan linguistic context, although almost all such studies are relatively recent. One work in the early modern era of Balkanology that is noteworthy in this regard is Afendras 1968, which contains a section each on the phonology of Judezmo and of Balkan Turkic, with particular attention to different dialects and to the integration of the study of these varieties into the larger Balkan context. Other works can be mentioned on a language-by-language basis. Although Feuillet 1986: 22 puts Turkish on a par with Serbo-Croatian as a peripheral language, Asenova 2002: 23 differentiates the two, pointing out that while Serbo-Croatian elicits mention owing to the fact that some Balkanisms extend into its territory, Turkish “ne e balkanski ezik, makar če e igral opredelena rolja pri formirajneto na BEC” (‘is not a Balkan language, although it has played a definite role in the formation of the B[alkan] L[inguistic] L[league]’). In neither of these authors, nor in most others after Sandfeld, does Judezmo find any mention, and the dialects of Balkan Turkish are completely absent from all the handbooks and even from Joseph 1983a: 255, which otherwise attempts to be conscientious in its fair treatment of all the Balkan languages.Footnote ⁴¹

This is not to say that Romani, Judezmo, and Balkan Turkic have never been studied in a Balkan linguistic context, although almost all such studies are relatively recent. For Romani we can cite Kostov 1973, 1998; Uhlik 1973; Joseph 1983a: 252–253; and Friedman 1985a, 2000bc, 2003e as well as Matras 1994a; Sawicka 1997; Boretzky 1995, 1998; and Boretzky & Igla 1999. For Judezmo there are the items cited in Bunis 1981: 36–38 as well as Joseph 1983a: 252–253; Pahmeyer 1980; Kowallik 1992/1993; Gabinskij 1992: 154–173, 1998; Bunis 1999: 60–122 as well as Friedman & Joseph 2014 and Friedman 2013a. Although Skok 1935 treats Turkish in its Balkan context, it is Németh’s 1956 classic work that marks the beginning of Balkan Turkish dialectology. However, most of the studies of Balkan Turkic (i.e., Turkish and Gagauz) have been published in a Turcological context (e.g., Menz 1999, and items cited in Gülensoy 1981 and Tryjarski 1990). Exceptions to this are studies of the influence of the Balkan languages upon local dialects of Turkish such as Jašar-Nasteva 1957, 1969, 1970, 1971/1972, 1986, 1992; Ibrahimi 1982; Friedman 1982c, 2002a, 2003a: 50–83, 2006c; Matras 2003/2004; Tufan 2007; Matras & Tufan 2007; Rentsch et al. 2018, 2020; Winistörfer forthcoming. For Romani and Judezmo, too, there are a number of linguistic works whose frame is Romology or Sephardic or Romance studies, respectively; see, e.g., the bibliographies in Bakker & Matras 2003 for Romani and Bunis 1981: 7–59 for Judezmo. To the extent that these treat dialects spoken in the Balkans, their material can and should be included.

When we seek the reasons for the relative paucity of Romani, Judezmo, and Balkan Turkic participation in the study of Balkan linguistics, a hint at an ideological motivation is found in Sandfeld 1930: 4.Footnote ⁴² In this passage he attributes the commonalities of the classic Balkan languages to the Byzantine Empire and the millennium-long domination of the Greek Orthodox Church promulgated by it and subscribed to by most of the speakers of the Balkan languages.Footnote ⁴³ The classic Balkan linguistic league is thus cast as a Greek Orthodox, Christian phenomenon.Footnote ⁴⁴ Although some Roms are Orthodox Christians, and moreover the Roms arrived in the Balkans prior to the fall of Constantinople, the majority of Roms in the southern Balkans are Muslims, and in any case, their religion has traditionally been viewed with suspicion by governments.Footnote ⁴⁵ Although Jews were resident in the Balkans before the coming of the Slavs, and in some places even before the Romans, the Judezmo-speaking Jews, like the Muslim Turks, arrived relatively late, and both the timing of their arrivals and their religious confessions would be inconsistent with a theory of the Byzantinogenesis of the Balkan sprachbund. Both the substrate model and the Latinate model of explaining Balkan linguistic phenomena likewise encounter potential difficulty if the languages of Roms, Jews, and Turks are included in the sprachbund, since those explanatory languages are also too far removed in time to account for Balkanisms in these “outsider” languages. If, on the other hand, while acknowledging the antiquity of language contact on the Balkan peninsula, we nonetheless focus on attested phenomena in all the relevant languages, then we see that it is the early modern period, i.e., the Ottoman, not the Byzantine, Empire, that provided the multilingual frame for producing the phenomenon of the Balkan sprachbund as it existed at the beginning of the twentieth century (cf. Asenova 2002: 214&ff. on attested forms of the Balkan future, Joseph 1983a: 179–212, and see §2.5.2).

Aside from the language ideology problem, there is the fact that source materials in and on these marginalized Balkan languages were not being produced at the same rate during the formative period of Balkan linguistics.Footnote ⁴⁶ This was connected in part with the fact that unlike Albanian, Greek, Balkan Slavic, and Balkan Romance, Romani, Judezmo, and Balkan Turkic dialects were not involved in the production of Balkan nation-states, for which “authentic” materials in national languages were a major ingredient (Bauman & Briggs 2003: 196–225). In the case of Roms, there was no nationalist movement whatsoever at this time. Among Jews, Zionism was dominated by Yiddish-speaking Jews and Judezmo was outside their purview; the debate was between Yiddish and Hebrew. As for Turkish, the purifiers who would create modern Turkish looked to the dialects of Anatolia and the Turkic languages of Central Asia for their sources of purity. It is ironic that just as language ideologies among the non-Turkic peoples of the Balkans looked on contact with Turkish as polluting (as described, e.g., in Kazazis 1977), so, too, Turks looked on their contacts with their non-Turkic neighbors in the same way.Footnote ⁴⁷ Thus, the linguists of the pre-modern and early modern period had at their disposal precisely the folkloric texts that were being collected to build the nations that would work against both the concept and the linguistic convergences of the sprachbund (see §2.5.2; some of these collections actually included materials in other Balkan languages, and in fact those materials have yet to be studied, e.g., Šapkarev 1894, a work currently claimed by both Bulgarian and Macedonian scholars, but in terms of modern dialectology, in Macedonian, which also contains materials in both Aromanian and Albanian).

There are other sociolinguistic differences between the “outsider” three and the “classic” four as well. Thus, for example, unlike the classic Balkan languages, which were the objects of two-way multilingualism, Romani and Judezmo were generally subjected rather to one-way multilingualism. In other words, speakers of the “classic” Balkan languages (and also Balkan Turkish) learned other languages and heard their languages spoken by others. In the case of Romani and Judezmo, however, their positions as languages of stigmatized groups (see Friedman & Dankoff 1991), both of which were strictly endogamous, meant that their speakers were of necessity multilingual but their languages were rarely learned by others (cf. also Rusakov & Eloeva 1990: 8). At the level of the mahala (‘neighborhood’), of course, children did learn each other’s languages, so there were non-Roms who knew Romani and non-Jews who knew Judezmo, and while intermarriages were frowned upon, they did occur (Marushiakova 1992), but all such phenomena were relatively rare vis-à-vis the level of multilingualism among the other Balkan languages.Footnote ⁴⁸ The occurrence of Judezmo words and phrases in folk songs and folk poetry or of Romani words in slang or secret languages (e.g., Cvetkovski 1988: 190; Jašar-Nasteva 1987) does not contradict this principle but rather is an indication of the relative rarity of multidirectional multilingualism (as opposed to unidirectional multilingualism) in these languages. Relevant too are codeswitching phenomena in Macedonian folk tales, in which Jews speak Turkish rather than Judezmo (Friedman 1995b). Of these three languages (Romani, Judezmo, and Balkan Turkish), Romani is the most viably Balkan in terms of surviving multilingualism, despite the depredations of the Holocaust, which targeted Roms as well as Jews (Kenrick & Puxon 1972). The Jewish communities of the Balkans were almost entirely destroyed by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War Two, and those that survived generally emigrated to Israel. Balkan Turkish is steadily losing ground to both migration and to other assimilatory factors (e.g., the dominance of Albanian among Muslims in North Macedonia and the spread of Standard Turkish as a result of increased access to Standard Turkish media). These changes in the linguistic environment from the days of Sandfeld bring us to the interrogations discussed in §2.5.2.

2.5.2 Questioning the Question

In §2.5.1 we discussed three speech communities whose languages or dialects have been traditionally excluded from Balkan linguistics. In this section, we examine various developments problematizing Balkan linguistics as a discipline. Regardless of whether one views the Byzantine or the Ottoman Empire, or both, as being formative of the Balkan sprachbund, the fact remains that the political structures that provided the frame for Balkan multilingualism had ceased to exist by the second decade of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁴⁹ Following a course of events begun in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the transformation of empire into nation-state and the ideology of the nation-state as a homogeneous unit with fixed borders (and a single “national” language) created conditions that were antithetical to Balkan multilingualism. Ideologies of purity and the notion of a standard language based on the vernacular but at the same time bounded and closed, excluding so-called “folk speech,” finds its analogy in other nineteenth century ideologies that appropriated “folk” material in order to refashion it as a vehicle for modern urban (bourgeois) acculturation (Baumann & Briggs 2003: 163–196). The ideology of purification that would make way for a new hegemonic hybridity had its most extreme realization in large-scale movements of populations.Footnote ⁵⁰ Such movements began with Muslims leaving former Ottoman territory as the empire contracted (McCarthy 2002: 135–151). In the aftermath of the Balkan Wars, the World War One treaties of Neuilly (November 27, 1919) and Sèvres (August 10, 1920) made provisions for people to “opt” for the nationality of a state other than the one in which they found themselves owing to the establishment of frontiers, and required them to move to that state if they did so opt (see Ladas 1932 on Greco-Bulgarian “voluntary” exchanges).Footnote ⁵¹ In the wake of the Greco-Turkish war, the Treaty of Lausanne (January 30, 1923) went a step further and mandated “a compulsory exchange of Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory, and of Greek nationals of the Muslim religion established in Turkish territory.”Footnote ⁵² The majority of rural immigrants from Turkey were settled in Greek Macedonia and contributed greatly to the Hellenization of the region by adopting Greek, even if their first language had been Turkish or some other language, and by pressuring local non-Greek inhabitants to leave (Pentzopoulos 1962: 27–48, 125–140). The aftermath of the Greek Civil War (1946–1948) resulted in the exodus or expulsion of even more non-Greek speakers (mostly Albanian and Macedonian) from northern Greece. Communist policies in the Balkans after World War Two, especially in the 1950s, also encouraged the emigration of Muslims to Turkey and Greek-speaking Sarakatsans to Greece (Ellis 2003: 43–63; Nedelkov 2011). Thus, not only was free communication over a large part of the Balkans impeded or restricted, but the attempt to build homogeneous nation-states also discouraged the development of multilingual situations.

It is in this connection that Topolińska 2000 makes the claim that the Balkan sprachbund as such no longer exists except as an historical artifact – rather like a given stage in the development of a genetic/genealogical family. While it is indeed true that the creation of national boundaries has broken up the larger unity that constituted the Balkan sprachbund as such, that the standardization of national languages and the concomitant effect of mass literacy and education have had a similar effect on linguistic development, and that, moreover, the rise of English as the international lingua franca has taken the place of local languages in contact situations, nevertheless, the same type of multilingualism with the same Balkan languages continues to exist at the communal level in all the Balkan countries, even those that claim that it does not exist.Footnote ⁵³ Despite increasing ethnic isolation (e.g., Icevska & Salihu 1998) and aggressive assimilatory policies in various Balkan countries (various Human Rights Watch/Helsinki Watch reports attest to this), all of which work against neighbors knowing the language of neighbors, there is still much that can be done to investigate both the remnants and the continuations of the Balkan sprachbund.Footnote ⁵⁴

In such a context, it is also important to reexamine dialectal accounts that homogenize and totalize larger areas, thereby erasing (Gal & Irvine 1995) important sources of variation within them. A single example to illustrate our point is the usual account of Geg Albanian that describes it in terms of expressing the future by means of the conjugated present of ‘have’ + infinitive, which is characteristic of Romance, rather than future expressed by the invariant marker derived from ‘want’ + subjunctive/conjunctive characterized as Balkan. In fact, however, there is considerable diversity within Geg, and even in Tosk, when Arbëresh is taken into account. Thus, for example, in Kelmend in Northwest Geg, the ‘want’ future is used in speculations (Shkurtaj 1975: 55). Further west, along the left bank of the river Buna, only the ‘want’ + subjunctive future occurs (Gjinari 1971: 252). A similar situation obtains to the southwest, in Puka (Xh. Topalli 1974: 316), which is transitional between the northeast and the northwest, although its center of gravity is Shkodër in the northwest. However, Shkrel, southeast of Kelmend, uses only ‘want’ + subjunctive (but also tash ‘now’ + progressive po + present indicative; Beci 1971: 298). In the southern part of Northeast Geg, e.g., Has (Gosturani 1975: 237) as well as the Presheva (Srb Preševo) valley (Badallaj 2001: 178), the future in ‘have’ is limited to a sense of obligation while ‘want’ + subjunctive is more volitional. In Upper Reka, the future in ‘have’ + infinitive has been completely replaced by ‘want’ + subjunctive (Haruni 1994: 76). South of Has and west of Upper Reka, in Luma, the two types of future are in competition, but the ‘want’ type predominates (Hoxha 1975: 165, 1990: 136). West of Luma, in Mirdita, the ‘want’ future is regular and the ‘have’ future is rare (Beci 1982: 84–85). Similarly, in Tuhin (Mac Tuin), southeast of Upper Reka and northeast of Kičevo (Alb Kërçova) in RN Macedonia, the ‘want’ future (with indicative) predominates, although ‘have’ + subjunctive also occurs, as it does in the Tosk dialects of Italy (Arbëresh) with relics also in Labëri (Totoni 1971: 73). In this region of RN Macedonia, as in transitional dialects such as Shpat, as well as Luzni (southwest of Peshkopi), the ‘have’ + infinitive future uses për + verbal noun (= të + participle) rather than me + participle. The me + participle construction is extremely rare in Tuhin, although its opposite (pa + participle ‘without VERB-ing’; cf. me ‘with’ vs. pa ‘without’) is quite common (Murati 1989: 41, 44; Çeliku 1971: 230; Beci 1974: 250). In general it is worth noting that in Albanian pa + participle often has a literal meaning, e.g., pa u lagur (lit., ‘without becoming wet’) ‘unharmed,’ but it can also have a temporal nuance of ‘before,’ e.g., pa u tharë (mirë) gjaku ‘before the blood was (even) dried’ (lit., ‘without being-dried (even) the-blood’; cf. Newmark 1998: s.v. pa). Thus, while Geg does have conjugated ‘have’ + infinitive in contexts where Tosk uses invariant ‘want’ + subjunctive, the characterization of Geg being opposed to Tosk in a simple binary manner in this respect fails to capture the complexities of Geg usage. In fact, Southern Geg goes with Tosk (including Arvanitika), while Northern Geg and Italian Tosk (i.e., Arbëresh) are linked by the use of ‘have’ as the future marker. Even when standard languages are taken as the source, a simple characterization such as “loss of the infinitive” does not capture the real complexity, as was emphasized by Joseph 1983a.

The typical characterization of the type ‘infinitive loss’ brings us to another point made by Topolińska 2004, who notes the need for Balkan linguistics to reorient not just its terminology, but the manner of investigation:

Here Topolińska is pointing to the origins of Balkan linguistics in Western European and Slavic linguistic contexts, in which the languages of the scholars in question (from Kopitar to Trubetzkoy, Sandfeld, and beyond) were taken as a norm and the Balkan languages taken as deviations from such a norm. Not only is it the case that Balkan linguistic developments can and should be viewed in their own context as communicatively motivated expansions of certain grammaticalized functions, but moreover, in certain instances, such as the expansion of analytically expressed case relations, a certain Slavocentric bias needs to be overcome. After all, it is indeed the case that in Macedonian, Bulgarian, and Torlak BCMS the expansion of analytically expressed case relations and the elimination of inherited synthetic expressions (cases) have gone further than elsewhere in Slavic;Footnote ⁵⁵ it is also true that Balkan Romance has been uniquely conservative among the Romance languages in preserving traces of synthetic case, and both Greek and Albanian, as well as Romani and Balkan Turkish, have likewise failed to expand analytic expressions of case to the same extent as Balkan Slavic.Footnote ⁵⁶

This in turn brings us to an important but generally neglected field of Balkan linguistic investigation, namely the interrelationship between convergence and divergence and the need to distinguish them carefully. Friedman 1983, using Macedonian and Albanian data, noted the fact that superficial resemblances sometimes mask underlying differences of structure. Friedman 1978 likewise observed that superficial resemblances between Bulgarian and Turkish could be explained by contact-induced convergence rather than simple borrowing. Fielder 1999 has expanded on this. (See §6.2.3 for details of these examples.) The different types of multilingualism mentioned above (§2.5.1) also involve differences between contact phenomena and boundary maintenance. This can be seen in the Macedonian dialects of Balkan Romani, where phonological conservatism seems to serve as a marker of ethnolinguistic boundary in the face of syntactic convergence (Friedman 2000b), and within syntax the noun phrase seems more resistant to contact phenomena than the verb phrase (Friedman 2000c). Moreover, within the verb, tense/aspect is more conservative than mood (Friedman 2001a; Matras 2002: 151–165).

The profound changes that took place during the course of the twentieth century completely altered the networks of contacts that produced the Balkan sprachbund even as that sprachbund was being theorized and studied in modern linguistic frameworks. The fixing of borders that reduced communication and disrupted traditional patterns of multilingualism, together with the creation and spread of standard languages that frequently relegated features typical of the sprachbund to lower or archaic registers, has created a situation in the twenty-first century in which the Balkan sprachbund is, in certain respects, an historical artifact. At the same time, the rise of English as a global lingua franca of unprecedented proportions has altered patterns of borrowing and calquing, and, potentially, of code-copying, and possibly even metatypy and fusion (Johanson 1992, 2002, 2023; Ross 2001; Matras 2000).Footnote ⁵⁷ In its Balkan context, English has become the Turkish of the twenty-first century: it is the major source of loanwords and new calques, and speakers of majority languages in the Balkan nation-states are more likely to know English than any of the national or minority languages of their immediate neighbors. Nonetheless, the previous exclusion of marginalized groups (see §2.5.1), the continuation of the sprachbund at the local level, and new approaches that take into account the greater array of dialectological materials available and also new theoretical approaches (see §2.5.3) all promise new and original understandings of the area in particular and contact phenomena in general. Moreover, as we see below, even the facts of the Balkan sprachbund as it has been theorized and described thus far deserve to be better known.

2.5.3 The Balkan Other and Other Linguistics: Areal, Contact, Typological, Ecological, Eurological

In this chapter we have been concerned with the history of Balkan linguistics as an independent field of investigation and with directions for further development in and of that field. As a branch of the larger discipline of linguistics, Balkan linguistics constitutes an oft-cited but little-utilized example of contact-induced language change (cf. Anttila 1972: 172–175; Campbell 1998: 287–310; Croft 2003: 24, 34, 36; Crowley 1992: 259; Hock & Joseph 2019: 350–356; Hock 1988: 259; McMahon 1994: 248–250; Myers-Scotton 2002: 174; Thomason & Kaufman 1988: 88, 95–96, 147; Thomason 1997: 105–109; Trask 1996a: 315–317; Weinreich 1968: 31–32, 50, 113; and Winford 2003: 8, 13, 64, 70–74; Heine & Kuteva 2005: 187–199 spend more time than most, but in a different sort of theoretical framework). In the next chapter, therefore, we survey relevant theoretical developments in the discipline of linguistics as a whole. Of particular concern to us is the contrast between Areal (now Contact) linguistics versus typological explanations (e.g., Hamp 1977a), the ecological approach to choices among competing alternatives to communicative efficacy (Haugen 1972; Mufwene 2001a), the epidemiological approach to the spread of language change (Enfield 2003), and the delimitation of areas such as the Balkans, Europe (the Eurotyp project, Reiter 1994; Haspelmath 1998; Heine & Kuteva 2006), Eurasia (Masica 1976, 2001), and beyond (e.g., Nichols 1992). It is also here that we discuss the principal concepts and methodologies that inform our approach to the field throughout this book.