Re: Balkan linguistic geography

From: Jim Rader
Message: 26607
Date: 2003-10-23

> > > Are the Balkans more linguistically diverse than Western Europe?
> I > don't think so. Certainly there is less dialect diversity in
> Stokavski > Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian
>
> I note that you left out the other -kavskis.

I left out Cakavski and kajkavski deliberately, of course. These are
spoken in much smaller areas than Stokavski--and Cakavski, at least,
has been losing ground to Stokavski.

>
> > or in Daco-Romanian than in say,
>
> Is that Romanian plus Aromanian etc? I got the impression they were
> mutually unintelligible?
>

Daco-Romanian is Balkan Romance minus Aromanian, Megleno-
Romanian, etc. I think this is standard usage. As is the case with non-
Stokavian dialects of Serbo-Bosno-Croatian, the varieties of Balkan
Romance other than Daco-Romanian are spoken in relatively small
areas and have been losing ground to surrounding languages (Greek,
Albanian, Macedo-Bulgarian).

I hesitate to generalize about Balkan linguistic geography, but some
areas became a linguistic mosaic due to relatively recent migrations
(e.g., of Geg Albanian speakers into Kosovo, of Serbs across the
Danube in the late 17th century), combined with state-controlled
immigration (e.g., of Turkish speakers into a number of areas, of
Germans into Vojvodina). The shading of one dialect into another with
considerable divergence at greater distances that we find in much of
western Europe is not so characteristic of the Balkans. The South
Slavic language with the most remarkable dialectal variation relative to
speech area is undoubtedly Slovene, culturally and geographically at
the fringe of the Balkans.

I'm out on a limb here with so many natives of the Balkans on the list,
so I ought to put on my flameproof suit. I would be genuinely
interested in reaction, though. Modern linguistic geography is not
without relevance to ancient linguistic geography (or is it?).

Jim Rader