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Slavica Helsingiensia 49 in Search of the Center and Periphery SLAVICA HELSINGIENSIA 49 IN SEARCH OF THE CENTER AND PERIPHERY: LINGUISTIC ATTITUDES, MINORITIES, AND LANDSCAPES IN THE CENTRAL BALKANS Maxim Makartsev & Max Wahlström (eds.) HELSINKI 2016 SLAVICA HELSINGIENSIA 49 Series editors Tomi Huttunen, Jouko Lindstedt, Ahti Nikunlassi Published by: Department of Modern Languages P.O. Box 24 (Unioninkatu 40 B) 00014 University of Helsinki Finland Copyright © by the authors ISBN 978-951-51-2520-0 (paperback) ISBN 978-951-51-2521-7 (PDF) ISSN-L 0780-3281, ISSN 0780-3281 (Print), ISSN 1799-5779 (Online) Cover design: Laura Vainio Color composition: Kukka Pitkänen Printed by: Unigrafia Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................... 4 Jani Korhonen, Maxim Makartsev, Milica Petruševska, & Ljudmil Spasov Ethnic and linguistic minorities in the border region of Albania, Greece, and Macedonia: An overview of legal and societal status ........................................................................ 13 Jouko Lindstedt Multilingualism in the Central Balkans in late Ottoman times ....................................... 51 Dušica Božović & Justyna Pierżyńska “It was better in the past:” The Serbo-Croatian Language in Macedonia Today ...................................................... 69 Paula Hämeen-Anttila & Antti Olavi Laine Linguistic landscapes in the Central Balkans: The main commercial streets in Struga and Ohrid ......................................................... 89 Andrei Călin Dumitrescu Intermarriage and the intergenerational transmission of Aromanian in the Central Balkans........................................................................... 103 Pavel Falaleev Turkish loanwords in Macedonian: Speakers’ awareness and attitudes ............................................................................... 115 Borče Arsov On some lexical archaisms in the Boboshtica Gospel and the Boboshtica dialect........................................................................................... 125 Elizabeta Ralpovska Lexical features of the Macedonian dialects of the Prespa region ................................ 137 Chingduang Yurayong Adnominal possession with kinship terms in Macedonian dialects around Lakes Ohrid and Prespa ................................................................................... 143 Ksenia Shagal Factors regulating variation in Macedonian relative clauses ........................................ 163 3 Introduction This book is an attempt to capture and analyze aspects of multilingualism, the situation of minority languages and their speakers, and non-standard linguistic variation in Albania, Greece, and Macedonia. Most of the contributions to this volume are based on material collected during a field excursion to the border area among these three countries in the Central Balkans, with the Lakes Ohrid and Prespa as its geographical point of orientation, organized by the Helsinki Area & Language Studies (HALS) initiative in June 2015. The Central Balkans today: multilingualism, linguistic minorities, and linguistic variation Multilingualism has significant implications for the Balkans. Widespread, stable, mutual multilingualism is widely thought to be one of the preconditions for the rise of the language contact phenomenon known as the Balkan sprachbund or linguistic area, characterized by grammatical convergence among the languages. A key question regarding today’s multilingual practices in the Balkans is the extent to which the current situation continues to mirror past linguistic diversity. Of particular interest is to determine whether today’s differences between social, ethnic, and linguistic groups in their multilingualism is indicative of the historical sociolinguistic circumstances that gave rise to the linguistic area. In the Balkans, the regions of Albania and geographical Macedonia resisted modern state-building processes the longest, being the last part of Europe to remain within the multiethnic Ottoman Empire. Only in the early 20th century did the area of the Central Balkans become divided among recently established nation states, with all having one favored or regionally preferred ethnicity and language as their emblems as well as, oftentimes, religion. The state-building processes included, for instance, the population exchange in 1923 between Turkey and Greece. The process involved two million people – Christians in Turkey and Muslims in Greece – and remains one of the largest ethnic cleansings in the history of Europe, approved and endorsed by the international community of the time. 4 In search of the center and periphery Despite these radical changes to its demographic composition, the Central Balkans remains to this day ethnically and linguistically the most diverse part of the Balkans, as the articles in this book likewise demonstrate. The Central Balkans also displays a particularly high concentration of convergent linguistic features among the languages, which makes it tempting to call the Central Balkans the center of the Balkan sprachbund as well. Linguistic minority groups do not always coincide with ethnic, religious, or social lines of division in the Central Balkans, but when they do, there are often serious implications for the minority. The wars following the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s epitomized the inter-ethnic intolerance and political chauvinism in the Balkans. The horrors in the Western Balkans nevertheless had the unfortunate effect of causing similar developments in the other Balkan countries to go somewhat unnoticed. A nationalistic upsurge before the collapse of socialism was characteristic of both Romania and Bulgaria, where hostile policies toward ethnic and linguistic minorities led to the persecution of vulnerable groups by the ailing dictatorships. In the Central Balkans, Greece to this day fails to reconcile the fact that before the early 20th century, modern-day Northern Greece was predominantly ethnically non-Greek. This failure is reflected in the refusal to officially recognize any minorities other than religious ones. Policies aimed at the assimilation of the ethnic and linguistic minorities were implemented throughout the century, and especially the civil war in the late 1940s and the military dictatorship between 1967 and 1974 meant a harsh backlash against minorities. At the same time, socialist Albania was characterized by a policy of isolation vis-à-vis the international community and paranoia about presumed enemies, both external and internal. Only a small number of those in ethnic and linguistic minorities gained recognition and protection under the law, a situation that has been slowly improving since the early 1990s. Official Macedonia often wishes to portray itself as a Slavic, Eastern Orthodox nation, but has long faced the pressure of coming to terms with the fact that one-third of the population is Muslim, most of them Albanians. The tensions between the Albanian minority and the Macedonian majority culminated in the Macedonian conflict in 2001. In addition, members of another minority, the Slavic Muslim Torbeši, seek recognition as a separate group. However, the recognition of the Torbeši would, in the eyes of some, threaten the status of the Slavic Macedonians as the entitled majority in the country. The Albanian-Macedonian tensions have been aggravated in the 2010s by the economic crisis and the actions of increasingly authoritarian 5 Introduction governments, yet an emerging civic society has begun to show its strength through anti-government demonstrations, unprecedented in scale and often manifestly multi-ethnic in nature. One “stateless” minority in particular, the Roms, has been and continues to be ostracized throughout the Balkans. Many legislative changes aimed at improving the status of the Roms have often fallen short, since discrimination against the Roms persists in everyday interactions with the majority. Also, in societies characterized by corruption and reliance on social networks for favors, social mobility for the Roms is hampered still further by limited access to the monetary economy and the lack of social capital. Meanwhile, the socio- economic status of the Aromanian minority does not differ significantly from that of the majority population. In addition, in Greece, the Aromanians do not necessarily consider themselves a distinct ethnicity, but rather Aromanian- speaking Greeks. Against this background, there are several questions related to the linguistic minorities in the Central Balkans. The two strategies used to advance nationalistic agendas throughout the 20th century, namely, assimilation and exclusion, have, in addition to the more general processes of urbanization and emigration, thoroughly changed the linguistic landscape. The resulting situation has meant, on the one hand, that for the younger members of linguistic minorities, the minority language is often no longer more than a heritage language, with varying levels of competence. On the other hand, the widespread mutual multilingualism of the previous centuries has been restricted to the speakers of minority languages, whereas the members of the respective majority languages have become essentially monolingual, excluding the “international” languages taught in school. Another factor that affects linguistic variation, one that is common to all of the developed world and that blurs traditional dialect boundaries, is the role of standard languages, prescribed through education and the media.
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