Balkan Encounters Old and New Identities in South-Eastern Europe
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SLAVICA HELSINGIENSIA 41 BALKAN ENCOUNTERS OLD AND NEW IDENTITIES IN SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE Editors: Jouko Lindstedt & Max Wahlström HELSINKI 2012 SLAVICA HELSINGIENSIA 41 Published by: Department of Modern Languages P.O. Box 24 (Unioninkatu 40 B) 00014 University of Helsinki Finland Copyright © by the authors ISBN 978-952-10-8538-3 (paperback) ISBN 978-952-10-8539-0 (PDF) ISSN-L 0780-3281, ISSN 0780-3281 (Print), ISSN 1799-5779 (Online) Printed by: Unigrafia Contents Editors’ Foreword ........................................................................................................... 5 Evangelia Adamou Social Networks in Greek Thrace: Language Shift and Language Maintenance .................................................................... 7 Željko Jozić Linguistic (Un)reality in Contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina .................................. 33 Kira Kaurinkoski The Muslim Communities in Kos and Rhodes: Reflections on Social Organization and Collective Identities in Contemporary Greece ............................................................... 47 Jaakko Kölhi Language and Identity in Montenegro: A Study among University Students .............................................................................. 79 Jouko Lindstedt When in the Balkans, Do as the Romans Do —Or Why the Present is the Wrong Key to the Past .................................................... 107 Tanja Tamminen Re-Establishing Cross-Border Cooperation Between Montenegro, Kosovo and Albania: The Balkans Peace Park and Local Ownership ........................................................... 125 Johanna Virkkula Muslim Names the Bosnian Way ................................................................................ 153 Max Wahlström Greek Cultural Influence on the Bulgarian National Revival: The Case of Petăr Beron’s “Fish Primer” (1824) ......................................................... 169 3 Editors’ Foreword This book contains eight scholarly articles whose aim is to analyze the origins, maintenance, and changes of some of the ethnic, linguistic, and regional identities in Southeastern Europe. Both majority and minority groups are discussed; the modern countries dealt with include Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Montenegro. In addition to the main languages of the region, the articles discuss smaller languages and varieties such as Balkan Turkish, Pomak, and Romani, as well as Montenegrin, the newcomer among the Balkan standard languages. In these articles, Southeastern Europe presents itself as a multifaceted and multilayered scene, where boundaries between different languages and ethnicities, or indeed borders between countries, are much less ancient and much less permanent than they are often conceived. New linguistic identities are discussed in the articles by Željko Jozić, who reports on the attitudes of students in Bosnia and Herzegovina with regard to the fact that there are three officially distinct, yet very similar constitutional languages in their country, and Jaakko Kölhi, who inter- viewed students of two Montenegrin universities about their attitudes towards the newly drawn distinction between the Serbian and Montenegrin languages. In her article, Johanna Virkkula describes how Bosniak ethnicity is reflected in the present-day name-choice practices of Bosnian Muslims. Tanja Tamminen’s article reports on the Balkans Peace Park project in the border region of Albania, Montenegro, and the newly established state of Kosovo. One of her conclusions is that in order to succeed, the project must seek to empower the local population rather than serve as a tool of the Europeanization process, often “understood as a simple one-way street of transfer of norms and practices.” The local minority groups of Greece are discussed in two articles based upon innovative fieldwork. Evangelia Adamou analyzes the reasons for language shift and language maintenance in the Pomak-Turkish-Greek– speaking community and the Romani-Turkish-Greek–speaking community of Thrace. Kira Kaurinkoski describes the social organization and collective identity of the Muslim communities living on the islands of Kos and Rhodes. Finally, two thematically connected articles by Jouko Lindstedt and Max Wahlström investigate the role of Greek language and scholarship during the national revival of the Slavs of Bulgaria and Macedonia. This collection of articles owes its existence to the research project Updating the Sociology of Language in the Balkans at the Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki. The project was granted funding 5 by the Academy of Finland for the five-year period from 2009 to 2013. Most of the articles originated as papers presented at a common seminar of the project, which was organized at the Finnish Institute in Athens in May 2011. We would like to express our gratitude to the Institute and its director Martti Leiwo for their support and for the smooth organization of the seminar. Special thanks are also due to Professor Juhani Nuorluoto, who had a substantial role in initiating the research project in Helsinki before moving to his present post at the University of Uppsala. Helsinki, 3 December 2012 Jouko Lindstedt & Max Wahlström 6 SLAVICA HELSINGIENSIA 41 ED. BY JOUKO LINDSTEDT & MAX WAHLSTRÖM BALKAN ENCOUNTERS – OLD AND NEW IDENTITIES IN SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE HELSINKI 2012 ISBN 978-952-10-8538-3 (PAPERBACK), ISBN 978-952-10-8539-0 (PDF), ISSN 0780-3281 Evangelia Adamou1 Social Networks in Greek Thrace: Language Shift and Language Maintenance In the second part of the twentieth century, several Pomak- and Romani- speaking communities living in Greek Thrace shifted to Turkish, the dominant local minority language. This paper attempts to trace the process that led to a shift in some communities but not in others, despite the fact that both types of communities were confronted with a reduction in the use of their languages in the domains of public life. I argue that in highly transitive networks, a shift takes place when some highly connected individuals decide to shift to the dominant language. Although the decision of these individuals who start the shifting process is related to language functional domains and language ideologies, it is important to note that a shift may or may not materialize due to reasons that are independent of the abovementioned fac- tors. Namely, the ideological background of the external network will have a significant influence on the speech community members and is a decisive factor in whether or not to shift. Background on Greek Thrace East Macedonia and Thrace (see Map 1) is an administrative region (περιφέρεια) of 611,000 inhabitants in Greece with a century-long presence of several linguistic communities. This is the setting of a nowadays bilingual Turkish-Greek–speaking community (approx. 55,0002) and of three major trilingual communities: a Pomak-Turkish-Greek–speaking community (ap- prox. 36,000), a Romani-Turkish-Greek–speaking community (approx. 20,000), and a small Armenian-Greek- (partly Turkish) speaking community (see Table 1). Next to and within the traditional multilingual communities, multilingual individuals also exist, but they are not the focus of this paper. 1 Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Lacito (Paris). 2 Numbers taken from several sources cited in Kostopoulos (2009, 290–291). 7 Evangelia Adamou Greek Turkish Greek Romani Turkish Greek Pomak Turkish Greek Armenian Greek Turkish Table 1: The monolingual, bilingual, and trilingual communities in Greek Thrace (with a focus on the Romani- and Pomak-speaking communities). The communities having Turkish as their first language (henceforth L1, for the language learned in the family or within the main socialization process) have a century-long presence in the area, ever since Ottoman times, but also from earlier settlements. Slavic-speaking populations arrived in the Balkans as early as the sixth and seventh centuries, but as far as the Pomaks are concerned, a debate exists as to whether they are descendants of Slavic origin or non-Slavic populations who shifted to Slavic (see Demetriou 2004 for an overview of the various approaches on the issue, largely depending on the nationality of the researchers). The Roma first arrived in Thrace within the Byzantine Empire in the tenth-eleventh centuries. Part of them settled in the Greek peninsula, others moved towards northern and western Europe. Among the Roma now settled in Thrace, several arrived from Turkey in 1923, others from present-day Romania at the end of the nineteenth century, while still others appear to have been settled in the villages of Thrace for several centuries. Lastly, Armenians arrived from Turkey in Thrace in 1914–18 under dramatic conditions, but only a minority of them settled in Thrace. During Ottoman rule (15th–19th centuries), Turkish was the most wide- spread vehicular language in the Balkans, used for trade, administration, and education (whether religious or not). In the Balkans in general, after Ottoman rule collapsed, only Muslim communities retained an intense con- tact with Turkish. In Greece, the Muslims of Greek Thrace were the only community to be exempted from the mandatory population exchange that took place between Greece and Turkey, being recognized as a minority in the Greek state. In 1923 (according to the Treaty of Lausanne), this minority was guaranteed the right to receive bilingual education in Greek (the state language) and Turkish (the language that was taken to be representative