Balkan language federation

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The Balkansprachbund is a linguistic union in south-eastern Europe , i.e. a group of languages ​​that are not genetically closely related, but which nevertheless have a number of striking structural similarities.

The "Balkansprachbund" includes Albanian (which is a separate branch in the Indo-European languages ) as well as the South Slavic languages Macedonian , Bulgarian and the Torlak dialect of Serbian , partly also Modern Greek and Romanian , possibly also Balkan Romansh in general , depending on the classification .

background

The languages ​​included in this linguistic union belong to the Indo-European language family, but come from different branches. Nevertheless, they share some peculiarities with one another that emerged relatively late and were not yet present in earlier language levels such as ancient Greek, Latin and Old Church Slavonic .

The most important are the following features:

  • the trailing specific article , e.g. B. “Wolf” → “the wolf”: in Romanian “ lup ” → “ lup ul ”, Albanian “ ujk ” → “ ujk u ” and Bulgarian “ вълк ” → “ вълк ът ”
  • the formal coincidence of genitive and dative
  • the lack of the inherited infinitive
  • the partial replacement of the infinitive after modal auxiliary verbs with the subjunctive
  • the future tense is paraphrased with the respective verb for “want”
  • the Schwa sound (Romanian: ă, Albanian: ë)

The way in which numerals 11 to 19 are formed according to the pattern "one on ten", "two on ten" has been adopted from the Slavic languages, e.g. B. alban. njëmbëdhjetë , dymbëdhjetë etc. and romanian. unsprezece , doisprezece , etc.

In addition, there are numerous similarities in the idioms , which can be traced back to Greek and Turkish expressions. Greek as a church language and cultural language in the Byzantine Empire and non-Indo-European Turkish as a language in the Ottoman Empire are influencing factors that contributed to the development of this linguistic union. In addition to this superstrate influence, the mutual linguistic influence through widespread bilingualism and multilingualism in a similar cultural milieu is used to explain the linguistic similarities in question. Not all similarities of the Balkansprachbund are equally pronounced in all associated languages. Albanian, Romanian and Macedonian share many characteristics in particular.

literature

  • Wolfgang Dahmen et al. a. (Ed.): Southeast European Romania. Settlement / migration history and language typology. Romance Studies Colloquium XXV. Narr, Tübingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-8233-6740-6 . ( Tübingen Contributions to Linguistics 532)
  • Jack Feuillet: Aire linguistique balkanique . In: Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher and Wolfgang Raible (eds.): Language Typology and Language Universals. An International Handbook . Volume 2. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2001, pp. 1510–1528.
  • Wilfried Fiedler : Introduction to Balkan Philology . In: Peter Rehder, Wilfried Fiedler (ed.): Introduction to the Slavic languages. (With an introduction to Balkan philology) . 3rd improved and enlarged edition. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1998, ISBN 3-534-13647-0 , pp. 347-364.
  • Harald Haarmann: Balkan Linguistics . Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen 1978.
  • Uwe Hinrichs (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Südosteuropa-Linguistik . Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1999, ISBN 3-447-03939-6 . ( Slavic study books NF 10).
  • Thede Kahl, Michael Metzeltin, Helmut Wilhelm Schaller (Hrsgg.): Balkanisms today . LIT-Verlag, Vienna / Münster / New York 2012, ISBN 978-3-643-50388-6 ( Balkanology 3).
  • Norbert Reiter: Basics of Balkanology. A step into Eurolinguistics . Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1994.
  • Helmut Wilhelm Schaller: The Balkan languages. An introduction to Balkan philology . C. Winter University Press, Heidelberg 1975.
  • AN Sobolev (ed.): Malyj dialektologičeskij atlas balkanskich jazykov. Biblion-Verlag, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-932331-31-1 . ( Studies on the Southeast European Language Atlas 2).
  • Georg Renatus Solta : Introduction to Balkan Linguistics with special consideration of the substrate and Balkan Latin. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1980, ISBN 3-534-07625-7 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Arthur Beyrer, Klaus Bochmann, Siegfried Bronsert: Grammar of the Romanian language of the present, VEB Verlag Enzyklopädie Leipzig 1987, p. 16 speak of the "middle vowel" in this context
  2. ↑ See u. a. Arthur Beyrer, Klaus Bochmann, Siegfried Bronsert: Grammar of the Romanian Language of the Present, VEB Verlag Enzyklopädie Leipzig 1987, p. 16 - here, however, remarkably with extensive omission of the Turkish influence and strong emphasis on the Greek influence with reference to Alexandru Rosetti : Istoria limbii române , Bucharest 1968, p. 208