The Balkan Sprachbund: a Multi-Variate Approach to the ‘Prototypical’ Case of Language Contact

The Balkan Sprachbund: A multi-variate approach to the ‘prototypical’ case of language contact

Olivier Winistörfer (University of Zurich, Switzerland) [email protected]

Keywords — Language typology, Sprachbund, language areas, Romance languages, Slavic languages

In my talk, I want to combine qualitative and quantitative, multi-variate approaches in order to verify whether a set of independent, binary variables from the full spectrum of the linguistic system (phonology, morphology, morphosyntax, syntax) support the claim of ’typological’ proximity between the Romance and the Slavic languages in the Balkans discussed in previous studies. Since the first mentions of parallelisms in the linguistic structures of the Romance and Slavic varieties in the Balkans by Jernej Kopitar (1829, 85-86) and the introduction of the term ’Balkan Sprachbund’ by Nikolai Trubetzkoy (1930), there have been many crosslinguistic studies on the alleged language proximity of the (Romance and Slavic) varieties in the Balkans due to intense historic language contact. This led Friedman/Joseph to the conclusion that ”[i]t is almost impossible to talk about the Balkans from a linguistic stand- point and not utter the term ‘Sprachbund’ [. . . ]" (Friedman & Joseph, 2017, 55). While there have been many qualitative studies on a restricted amount of parallelisms between languages in the Balkans (e.g. Tomić 2006, Thomason 2000, Sandfeld 1930, Kopitar 1829), there have been almost no attempts to describe the particular case of the Balkans from a quantitative point of view until now. In my talk, I want to tackle this particular question with different typological datasets. After having presented the results from a quantitative pilot study I conducted with the data from the WALS (2013) database which seem to support the claim of a Balkan Sprachbund and having discussed the problems of this particular dataset, I propose a new approach to the question of the Balkan Sprachbund by combining qualitative and quantitative approaches already known from other fields of linguistic typology. On the basis of the variables presented in the World Atlas of Language Structures, WALS (2013), Autotyp (2013), as well as in Birchall (2014), and Haspelmath (2010), I introduce a set of independent, binary variables from phonology, morphology, morphosyntax, and syntax adapted to the particular case of the (Romance and Slavic) languages in the Balkans. In a next step, I classify the linguistic phenomena we find in the Romance (Aromanian, Dacoromanian, Meglenorormanian) and the Slavic varieties (Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Torlak) often considered members of the Balkan Sprachbund as well as their sister languages not located in the Balkans (French, 2

Italian, Spanish from the Romance vs. Polish, Russian from the Slavic language family). The database is then used to verify whether a typological dataset and the quantitative analyses (Mann-Whitney test, Multi-Dimensional Scaling, NeigborNet) support the claims from previous studies suggesting that the varieties in the Balkans are linguistically ’closer’ in comparison to the other branches of their language families. This study can be considered an important contribution for future work on the Balkan Sprachbund and areal linguistics as it combines qualitative as well as quantitative approaches and as it considers non-standardised Romance and Slavic varieties in the Balkans, a group that has traditionally been neglected in quantitative studies, but can be of impor- tance to the question of the Balkan Sprachbund. In addition, the linguistic diversity within the varieties can be represented in the set of variables due to the use of binary variables and lay the foundation for more such studies in the ﬁeld of linguistic areas and language families.

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