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A Seminar in the Monday Series

Monday 7 September, 4pm - 5.30pm, Room W3.03 Baldessin Precinct Building

 

Professor Peter Hill, Visiting Fellow, Russian Studies, School of Language Studies

 

Language Contact in South-Eastern Europe in the Modern Era

 

There is – or used to be - probably more language contact (LC) in South-Eastern Europe (SEE) than anywhere else in Europe . Intensive LC led to the rise of the so-called “Balkan Linguistic League” ( Balkansprachbund ). In Macedonia , for instance, in the pre-national period adult men typically spoke a number of different languages or dialects. During the Ottoman period, Turkish was the language of the towns, especially the market place and administration, as well as that of some villages. In the Bulgarian-speaking territories there was contact between Bulgarian as the indigenous language, Greek as the language of trade and culture and the language of instruction in secular schools and Turkish as the language of the Ottoman administration. With the establishment of the nation states in the 19th and 20th centuries the “national” language was promoted to the detriment of all others. With the codification of national standard languages, certain varieties come to be classified as “dialects” (French patois ) or as minority languages. Members of the national minorities need to use the official language of the state in which they live in their dealings with state authorities and with members of the linguistic majority group. Thus, one-sided LC replaced the traditional multilateral LC. After World War II, the Soviet Union imposed its own social order on the countries of SEE. Inevitably, Russian expressions became a part of everyday reality in those countries: Cro Srb aktivist(a) , fiskultura, kolektivizacija , Alb fizkulturë, plastmasë. The Ottoman “yoke” is reflected in the languages of the former subject peoples as numerous “Turkisms” or Orientalisms. With the standardization of these languages in the 19th and 20th centuries the Orientalisms were relegated to the substandard sphere - whence they have now resurfaced as an extremely effective stylistic device, notably in the press. In modern times there is the phenomenon of gurbet (kurbet) or pecalba , which was typical especially for Albania , Serbia , Macedonia and Bulgaria : in the 18 th , 19 th and 20 th centuries migrant workers would go abroad for some months or even years to earn money before returning home. In the 1960s such migrant workers went to western Europe and brought back some German or French expressions that they had learned while working there. Since 1989 there has been a reaction against everything that went before that iconic date, especially amongst the young. There is now ubiquitous contact between all the indigenous languages of SEE and English. This one-sided LC between the national standard languages and English results in a huge number of (mostly unassimilated) loans.