In: Juliane Besters-Dilger, Cynthia Dermarkar, Stefan Pfänder & Achim Rabus (eds.). 2014.

Congruence in Contact-induced Language Change: Language Families, Typological Resemblance,

and Perceived Similarity. Berlin – Boston: De Gruyter. Pp. 168–183.

Balkan Slavic and Balkan Romance: From congruence to convergence

Jouko Lindstedt (Helsinki)

Proto-Slavic and Balkan Latin/Romance came into intense contact in the Balkans after the Slavs
spread to the peninsula from the 6th century CE onwards. Originally, Proto-Slavic and Latin possessed
fairly similar grammatical structures of the Indo-European synthetic type, but instead of simply
reinforcing this similarity, both languages became subject to changes that made them members of the
developing Balkan Sprachbund, or the Balkan linguistic area. In this paper I shall compare their roles
in the formation of this area and discuss their possible mutual structural interference. The Balkan
system of definite articles will be used as the main illustrative material.
Although the Balkan Sprachbund did not come into being by borrowing from a single source
language, different languages contributed variously to the system of Balkan enclitic articles, and the
roles of Albanian and Balkan Romance were greater than that of Balkan Slavic. Explanations for the
different roles of the Balkan languages in the Sprachbund formation should be sought in social history
rather than in structural factors.

1. Balkan convergence as mutual reinforcement of change

Ever since Kopitar’s (1829) pioneering article, structural similarities among Balkan Slavic, Balkan
Romance, and Albanian have attracted the attention of linguists. In modern terms, Balkan Slavic
comprises Bulgarian, Macedonian, and the Prizren-Timok (or Torlak) dialects of Serbian, and Balkan
Romance means Daco-Romanian (i.e., Romanian proper) as well as the much smaller Aromanian,
Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian. Judezmo (Judaeo-Spanish, Ladino), although a Romance
language spoken in the Balkans, is usually not included in Balkan Romance, owing to its different
history and structure. Albanian is usually treated as a single language, although the difference between
the Gheg and Tosk dialects is notable. By the appearance of Sandfeld’s (1930) Linguistique
balkanique, Greek had already been accepted as one more member of what is called the Balkan
Sprachbund, or the Balkan linguistic area. Romani, though still ignored in Asenova’s (2002) solid
description of the Sprachbund, for instance, is now more and more often explored in its Balkan context
– at least those of its dialects whose speakers have remained in South-Eastern Europe (Friedman
2000b, 2000a: 3–4; cf. Boretzky & Igla 1999).
The Balkan linguistic area is thus defined by structural convergences among Balkan Slavic,
Balkan Romance, Albanian, Greek, and, for some researchers at least, the South-East European
Romani dialects. Those of their convergent features that are not simply part of their common Indo-
European inheritance but rather due to their prolonged contacts in the Balkans are known as
Balkanisms. There are lexical, phraseological, phonological, grammatical, and pragmatic Balkanisms,
but grammatical ones have received most attention as they testify to a long, intense contact among the
languages affected. Not all Balkanisms are manifested equally by all the languages of the area, and
languages can consequently be divided into “more Balkanized” and “less Balkanized”. No definitive
and commonly accepted set of grammatical Balkanisms exists, but the grammatical innovations
included in the following list more or less coincide with those proposed in other contemporary studies
(Lindstedt 2000: 232–234, with some modifications):

Argument marking
1. Enclitic articles (postpositive and linking articles).
2. Object reduplication (clitic doubling).
3. Prepositions instead of cases: a tendency away from inflectional case marking.
4. Recipient/possessor merger.
5. Goal/location merger.
6. Relativum generale: relative clauses introduced by an uninflected marker.

Verb system
7. Finite complementation (lack of an infinitive).
8. Volo future: the verb ‘to want’ grammaticalized as the marker of the future tense.
9. The past future tense used as an irrealis conditional mood.
10. Habeo perfect: a perfect (anterior) tense formed with the auxiliary ‘to have’.
11. Grammaticalized evidentials.

Other
12. Analytic comparison of adjectives.

The common typological characteristic of these grammatical Balkanisms is explicit analytism, by

which I mean the overt marking of grammatical relations with free morphemes – prepositions,
(p)articles, and auxiliaries. Explicit analytism can be opposed both to synthetism, i.e., grammatical
marking with bound morphemes, and to isolating analytism where word order is the sole marker of
grammatical relations.
In terms of the above list of features, Balkan Slavic (especially Macedonian) forms the most
“Balkanized” core of the area, followed by Albanian, Balkan Romance, Greek, and Romani (Lindstedt
2000: 234). The main problem with this approach is that when whole languages, or genetic subgroups
of languages, are compared, it is difficult to account for the varying distribution of Balkanisms in their
dialects. It can roughly be said that the most Balkanized dialects of the five language groups are to be
found in Central Balkans, around the lakes Ohrid and Prespa. The high “Balkanization score” of
Macedonian is mainly due to the fact that its standard language was based upon dialects that were
closer to this epicentre of the linguistic area than those dialects the other standard languages of the
Balkans have drawn on.
As rightly pointed out by Aronson (2007), among others, most Balkanisms are features that are
easy to find in European languages outside the Balkans, and they are not typological rarities
worldwide, either. The infinitive-less complementation of the Balkan languages is perhaps their most
exotic structural feature from a European point of view, but among the languages of the world, this
type is quite common (Haspelmath 2011). What makes the Balkan area special is thus not the
uniqueness of its defining features, but rather their sheer number and their central position in the
grammars of the participating languages. The grammatical Balkanisms are found, as dominant features
or at least as strong dialect tendencies, in all five (sometimes four) of the main Balkan language
groups, which represent different branches of Indo-European, and this shows the strength of the areal
diffusion effect.
The first scholars discussing structural similarities among the Balkan languages, Kopitar (1829)
and Miklošič (1861), did not need a special concept for this kind of multilateral contact influence
because they saw the source of the Balkanisms essentially in one direction: in the substratum influence
of the so-called Palaeo-Balkan languages, spoken in the Balkans before the arrival of the Latin
speakers and the Slavs. Miklošič (1861: 6) called this “das alteinheimische Element”: Modern
Albanian is the continuation of one of the Palaeo-Balkan languages – perhaps Illyrian, as first
suggested by the Swede Johann Thunmann (1774: 240–282) – whereas Balkan Slavic and Balkan
Romance adopted Balkan features, similar to those of Albanian, by a substratum effect. The question
of Balkanisms in Greek, which certainly never had a similar Indo-European substratum, was not
posed. But the substratum explanation does not really work for Balkan Slavic either: in Old Church
Slavonic, as attested from the 10th century onwards, there were practically no Balkanisms, though the
Slavs had already been living in the Balkans for four centuries and the language shift must have been
well underway by then. And of course the hypothesis was also more or less circular: we do not really
know anything about the grammars of Illyrian, Thracian, or other Palaeo-Balkan languages (Solta
1980: 11–39), so the explanation that, say, the postpositive definite article of Bulgarian is due to the
Thracian substratum cannot be verified.
Thus, grammatical Balkanisms cannot be traced back to a single (and unknown) substratum, but
most of them are not borrowings from a single dominant language either. Turkish, the state language
of the Ottoman era, was obviously too different typologically to exert significant influence on the
Indo-European languages of the Balkans – congruence seems to have been a precondition for
convergence. Turkish is, however, the most obvious source of the grammaticalized evidential
distinctions (Friedman 1978, 1999: 521). Greek, the dominant language of the Byzantine era, and later
the prestige language among the Christian population of the Ottoman Empire, would be a better
candidate, and Sandfeld (1930: 213) did indeed seek the source of most Balkanisms in Greek (“dans la
grande majorité des cas”) though he admitted that the postpositive article, at least, must have had a
different source. However, regarding most lists of Balkanisms, Greek turns out to be less Balkanized a
language than Balkan Slavic, Balkan Romance, and Albanian. There is also a strong logical argument
against the primacy of Greek: all Balkanisms whose source has been sought in Greek are post-classical
innovations in this language, too; as a prestige language of the Balkans, we would expect it to have
contributed old and new features alike to the Sprachbund, but this is not the case. Thus, even in Greek,
Balkanisms were innovations that it shared with other languages of the area to begin with (Lindstedt
2000: 237).
The history of most Balkanisms is vague as regards the source of the innovations in a particular
Balkan language, but it seems clear that after this unknown initiation, each change spread in several
languages more or less simultaneously. It is difficult to call Balkanisms structural loans, as neither the
source nor the target of the borrowing – or, in Johanson’s (2008) terminology, neither the model nor
the target of grammatical copying – are clearly defined (Asenova 2002: 291). Friedman (2000b: 95)
has called this “interactive interference”, and I have written about “contact-induced change by mutual
reinforcement” (Lindstedt 2000). Horrocks describes the contacts between Romance and Greek with
such terms as “mutual consolidation of changes already under way” and “mutual reinforcement of
trends” (2010: 346, 348), and Thomason (2008: 45) writes about “negotiation” between language
systems resulting in “partial transfer”.
It is beyond the scope of this article to assess how unique the Balkan linguistic area is and what
general properties it possibly shares with other areas or Sprachbünde around the globe (for a recent
critical survey, see Tosco 2008). Trubetzkoy (1928), the father of the Sprachbund concept, seems to
have aimed at a concept complementary to, and equally well-defined as, genetic families, but in actual
practice there are rather few good examples of such uncontroversial Sprachbünde. Even the usefulness
of the Balkan Sprachbund itself as a concept has been questioned (Aronson 2007, Spasov 2010), but
no one has denied the existence of interesting contact-induced grammatical changes in the Balkans. I
prefer Sinnemäki’s (2010: 895) approach: “the concept of linguistic area is not used here for an
ontologically well-delimited entity but as a way to operationalize the more general phenomenon of
areal diffusion”.

2. Balkanized Romance or Romanized Slavic?

Balkan Slavic and Balkan Romance have served as heuristic keys for understanding the Balkan
linguistic area, because contrary to Greek and Albanian, both possess close relatives outside the
Balkan area with which they can be compared so as to determine the specifically Balkan innovations.
As for Romani, the dialects spoken outside the Balkans have been secondarily de-Balkanized (Finnish
Romani, for instance, has developed a new infinitive), but there are no Romani dialects that have
never passed through the Balkans.
The status of Balkanisms in Balkan Slavic and Balkan Romance, as compared to their closest
relatives, is not the same (cf. Topolińska 2010: 33–34). Balkan Slavic is typologically different from
the rest of Slavic languages, and this difference is mainly explained as a result of the influence of other
Balkan languages. Balkan Romance does not differ from other Romance languages so radically.
Object reduplication, recipient/possessor merger, goal/location merger, the use of the past future tense
as an irrealis mood, the habeo perfect, and the analytic comparison of adjectives – indeed, half of the
grammatical Balkanisms are to a significant extent attested also in Romance languages outside the
Balkans. No Slavic languages outside the Balkan area have grammaticalized definite articles, but all
Romance languages do – it is only the position of the article after the head noun that is peculiar to
Balkan Romance. As for nominal declension, the Balkan environment seems to have influenced the
two language groups quite oppositely: only Balkan Slavic among all Slavic languages has lost case
inflection (except for some pronouns), whereas only Balkan Romance among all Romance languages
has preserved it, though with fewer distinctions than in Latin.
The roles of Slavic and Romance in the formation of the Balkan linguistic area seem to have been
different, in that Slavic mainly adopted Balkan innovations, whereas Romance had a more active role
in initiating and forming those innovations. As explained in section 1 above, the simple distinction
between source and target languages does not do justice to the patterns of areal diffusion in the
Balkans, to be sure, but it is nevertheless significant that no major Balkanism has had its origin
attributed to Slavic. The biggest structural contribution of Slavic to the Sprachbund seems to be the
pattern of forming the numerals 11 to 19 as “one upon ten”, “two upon ten” etc.: cf. Old Church
Slavonic dŭva na desęte ‘twelve’ (and similarly in all Slavic languages, e.g. Russian dvenadcat’),
Romanian doi-spre-zece ‘id.’, Albanian dy-mbë-dhjetë ‘id.’ – but Modern Greek δóδeka, and Romani
uses the model “ten and two” (Matras 2002: 28), e.g. Finnish Romani deȟ-o-dui.
The Proto-Slavic language spread to the Balkans from the middle of the sixth century CE
onwards. The main component of the Slavic invasion was the mainly agricultural population that
settled all over the Balkans with the weakening of Byzantine imperial control. The Slavs became the
dominant population not only in Illyria and Thrace, but also in much of the Greek countryside,
including Macedonia, Thessaly, and even all of Peloponnesus. This is attested to not only by historical
sources (Vasmer 1941: 11–19; Weithmann 1994), but also by the numerous Slavic place-names found
all over Greece, even in such southern regions as Laconia and the island of Crete (Vasmer 1941). The
mediaeval Slavic states of Bulgaria and Serbia had a well-developed written language based upon Old
Church Slavonic, which was created by Cyril and Methodius in the 9th century, but the prestige of
Slavic as a language of a higher culture never rivalled that of Greek. Slavic loans can be shown in all
Balkan languages (Hinrichs 1999), but their Slavic influence is mainly of the adstratal type, though
north of the Danube, Slavic may also have had the role of a substratum.
The role of Romance, and its predecessor Latin, was more manifold. First, Latin was the
dominant language in the Roman Empire. Its influence on Greek can be detected from late Antiquity,
long before the Slavs’ arrival in the Balkans (Haarmann 1999: 565–568; Horrocks 2010: 126–132). In
the mediaeval Byzantine Empire the influence of Latin and Romance was much weaker, but it again
increased after the “Latin” conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204; this influence mainly
came from Italian and French (Horrocks 2010: 345–349).
Second, the language of the native speakers of Balkan Romance (often known as Wallachians or
Vlachs), was an adstratum of other Balkan languages, and it also became a substratum when part of
the Vlachs living south of the Danube shifted to Slavic and Greek. Gołąb (1997) has argued that the
Aromanian adstratum and substratum had a “decisive role” in the Balkanization of Macedonian, and
that several Balkanisms developed in Balkan Romance before Balkan Slavic. Markovik’ (2007) has
analysed the contact of Macedonian and Aromanian at the dialect level in and around the city of Ohrid,
in the very centre of the Sprachbund. Other studies on Aromanian-Slavic contacts include Ylli (2008),
Schaller (2008), and Sobolev (2008).
Third, Romance languages also functioned as a channel for European linguistic features to enter
the Balkans. The Balkans are not an exotic linguistic area outside Europe proper but rather part of the
core of “Standard Average European” (Haspelmath 1998: 273; Aronson 2007: 7–12). Haspelmath
(1998: 285) tentatively places the beginning of SAE in “the time of the great migrations at the
transition between antiquity and the Middle Ages”, though he admits that different features of this
European linguistic area may have largely different ages. According to him, “most SAE features were
absent in Latin and developed only in the Romance languages” (Haspelmath 1998: 285). As argued by
Mufwene (2008: 45–49, 218–220), the birth of Romance languages out of Latin meant restructuring as
radical as is usually associated with creoles.
Yet another difference between Balkan Slavic and Balkan Romance is that Balkan Romance
shows a much greater number of words that are only known in the Balkans and must come from the
Palaeo-Balkan substratum languages. They are mostly words attested only in Balkan Romance and
Albanian, and associated with transhumance and livestock breeding (Solta 1980: 39–58). Insofar as
Albanian, whose earlier history we do not know, is a descendant of one of the Palaeo-Balkan
languages (such as Illyrian), it is of course incorrect to speak about “substratum words” in it. Part of
these lexical Balkanisms in Balkan Romance may be borrowings from Albanian or its ancestor; others
may come from a substratum language that has completely disappeared (see Solta 1980: 58–63 for
discussion). At any rate it seems that the earlier arrival of Romance, in comparison with Slavic, meant
also stronger influence from the older languages of the peninsula.
Romance (as Latin) and Slavic arrived in the Balkans with fairly congruent grammatical systems
– with case inflection and no articles, with several past tenses opposed aspectually, and infinitive
complementation. In the Balkans they adopted much the same grammatical innovations, but as
explained above, their role in the formation of the linguistic area was not the same. I shall now
exemplify this with one of the major Balkanisms, the enclitic article.

3. The enclitic article

The Balkan enclitic article (mostly a definite article, but cf. the Albanian adjective below) comes in
two varieties. The better-known type is the postpositive definite article, which is a second-position
clitic inside the NP, as in Bulgarian čovek ‘man, human being’, čovek-ăt ‘the man’, dobrij-at čovek
‘the good man’. In addition to Balkan Slavic, it can be found in Balkan Romance, as in Romanian om
‘man, human being’, om-ul ‘the man’, and Albanian: njeri ‘man, human being’, njeri-u ‘the man’.
Contrary to Balkan Slavic, in Balkan Romance and Albanian the adjective usually follows the head
noun, so the enclitic definite article does not move when an adjective specifier is added. However,
when the Romanian or Albanian adjective is in the marked position before the noun, it takes the
postpositive article as in Balkan Slavic, cf. Romanian om-ul bun ‘the good man’, but also bun-ul om
‘id.’ (Solta 1980: 186).
 Greek and Romani do not possess a similar postpositive definite article; their definite article is
normally at the beginning of the NP and the unmarked word order is Adjective + Noun, as in Greek o
kalós ándras ‘the good man’, Romani o baro raklo ‘the big boy’. However, when the adjective is in
the marked position after the head noun, the definite article must be repeated: Greek o ándras o kalós,
Romani o raklo o baro. This linking article between the head noun and the following specifier
(adjective or possessive) is the other variety of the Balkan enclitic article. It is also found in Romanian
in addition to the postpositive article: om-ul cel bun ‘the good man’; in this example it is optional, but
it is obligatory when the adjective does not come immediately after the head noun, as in duh-ul
Domnului cel sfânt ‘the Lord’s holy spirit’ (Solta 1980: 188). In Albanian, the linking article is
obligatory for a great number of adjectives, even when the nominal reference is indefinite: it is used
not only in njeri-u i mirë ‘the good man’ (where -u is the postpositive definite article and i the linking
article) but also in një njeri i mirë ‘a good man’ (with the prepositive indefinite article një). It precedes
the adjective even in the marked pre-nominal position, cf. vajz-a e mirë ‘the good girl’ (-a is a
postpositive article, e is a linking article), but e mir-a vajzë ‘id.’ (Agalliu & al. 2002: 170; Solta 1980:
193). Notice that the Albanian adjective mir- here takes two articles – though it is of course possible to
analyse the Albanian linking article as a structural marker different from what is usually understood by
an article.
We thus have two varieties of the enclitic article, the postpositive article and the linking article,
which appear in the Balkan languages in various combinations and with different rules governing their
use. The systems are different, but the common features are also easy to see. The languages have
drawn on a common feature pool – to use Mufwene’s (2001: 4–6) concept – to which they have all
contributed (perhaps with the exception of Romani) and from which they have selected different
combinations of features.
The contribution of Slavic to the feature pool was the optionally enclitic demonstrative pronoun.
Bulgarian kniga-ta ‘the book’ is clearly the same construction as Polish książka ta ‘this book’. In Old
Church Slavonic texts, the demonstrative tŭ ‘this, that; it’, which became the source of the definite
article in Balkan Slavic, is often enclitic (město to ‘this place’), and it can also appear between an
adjective and the head noun, e.g. bogočĭstivy tŭ mǫžŭ ‘this pious man’ (Supr. 564.13–14). It is difficult
to judge in the texts when tŭ was grammaticalized as a real definite article, but it is interesting to note
that in the 11th-century Codex Suprasliensis, which is a translation from Greek, it sometimes
corresponds to the Greek definite article in the original (Solta 1980: 195; but cf. Kurz 1937–1938 and
1939–1946 for a critical review of all the relevant examples). In the 12th century, the Balkan Slavic
definite article must have already been established (Mirčev 1978: 196–205).
 Slavic may also have been one of the languages that contributed the idea of grammaticalized
definiteness, because Proto-Slavic (just as Baltic) had earlier developed a category of definite
adjectives adding the demonstrative *jĭ after the adjective. Thus, Old Church Slavonic opposes novo
město ‘a new place’ and novo-je město ‘the new place’, with a so-called long or definite adjective
(Leskien 1969: 102–109). In Modern Bulgarian and Macedonian this distinction has disappeared, the
long adjective as such being only used as part of some masculine toponyms such as Bulgarian Gorni
Dăbnik ‘Upper D.’, Dolni Dăbnik ‘Lower D.’; cf. the normal masculine singulars goren ‘upper’ and
dolen ‘lower’. However, the masculine definite article in Balkan Slavic does not attach to this normal
masculine form but to the old long form, as in Bulgarian gornij-at etaž, Macedonian gorni-ot kat ‘the
upper floor’. This shows that the new system of definite t articles came into being before the old
system of definite j articles had completely disappeared.
While most of Slavic lost the old distinction between definite and indefinite adjectives (at least in
the definiteness function), all of Romance developed definite articles (Posner 1996: 126–131), and the
contribution of Balkan Romance to the grammaticalization of definiteness must therefore have been
significant. And although most of Romance has a prepositive definite article, the position after the
head noun was possible for the Latin demonstrative ille, from which most of Romance (with the
exception of Sard and some varieties of Catalan, Posner [1996: 128–129]) developed its definite
article: Vae autem homini illi […] Bonum est ei, si non esset natus homo ille ‘Woe to that man (…)
good were it for that man if he had never been born’ (Vulgata, Mark 14:21).
Greek cannot have contributed a postpositive article to the Balkan feature pool, but certainly the
idea of definiteness itself. Moreover, the linking article in Greek is an ancient phenomenon and as
pointed out by Solta (1980: 193–194), the Greek system is not as irrelevant to the Balkan system of
articles as is often suggested. As for Romani, it seems to have copied the Greek system without
essential changes (Matras 2002: 96).
The history of Albanian is poorly known, because the oldest texts are from the 16th century
(Fiedler 2006: 48), but the postpositive article seems to have been an ancient phenomenon in it.
Internal reconstruction shows that it antedated Latin loan words in the language. The linking article is
of later date, being less grammaticalized in several respects (Voronina 1976: 154–155, based on
Çabej’s studies; cf. also Fiedler 2006: 36–37). Hamp (1982) has also presented possible toponymic
evidence, from the Roman period, for the postpositive article in the ancestor language of modern
Albanian.
Thus, although a simple substratum explanation does not account for all of the Balkan article
systems, the ancestor language of Albanian, which perhaps had close relatives in the Balkans, was the
first to contribute a postpositive article to the Balkan feature pool. Greek contributed the
grammaticalization of definiteness, though it had a different kind of marker for it. Balkan Slavic and
Balkan Romance both contributed the optionally enclitic demonstrative that could be used as material
for a postpositive definite article; it seems that the enclitic tendency of the Proto-Slavic tŭ was even
stronger than that of the Latin ille. As for expressing definiteness grammatically, this seems to have
been a stronger tendency in Romance – as it eventually affected all of Romance – than in Slavic,
which only had the old and weakening system of long (definite) adjectives for this purpose.
The linking article is younger in Albanian than the postpositive article, but it is common to
different types of specifiers (adjectives and possessives). Balkan Romance uses different linking
articles for adjectives (cel) and possessives (al, also used with ordinal numbers). Standard Romanian is
different from Albanian in that the possessive linking article is not used if the possessor (in the dative
case) follows immediately after the postpositive article, as in limb-a animalelor şi a paserilor ‘the
language of the animals and the birds’, where the first -a is a postpositive article and the second a is a
linking possessive article before the possessor paserilor ‘the birds’ (in the plural dative). In Aromanian
(as in older Daco-Romanian) the article is used even immediately after the postpositive article (Solta
1980: 187). Notice that the linking a is really an article, not a preposition, as it agrees with the
feminine genre and singular number of limb- ‘language’; the masculine singular form would be al, the
feminine plural ale and so on. The linking article thus agrees with the possessed noun on its left, not
with the possessor noun on its right.
The Greek linking article could have been the oldest model for the linking articles in Balkan
Romance and Albanian, though there certainly was also interactive interference between these two.
The Romance copy differs from the model in that there are two different linking articles according to
the function; the Albanian copy differs in that the linking article is also used in indefinite noun
phrases. In all, the Albanian and Balkan Romance are nearer to each other than either of these to
Greek. Balkan Slavic did not develop a linking article because its unmarked word order is Adjective +
Noun. In the southernmost Slavic dialects, the Greek Noun + Adjective constructions with a linking
article are copied by means of doubling the postpositive article: the Greek i jortés i meγáles “the-
holidays-the-big” = ‘the great festivals’ may be rendered as praznici-te golemi-te “festivals-the-big-
the” (e.g. on the title page of the Kulakia Gospel, written in Macedonian near Thessaloniki in 1863,
see Mazon & Vaillant 1938: 3–4).

4. Discussion

In terms of Johanson’s (2008: 64–65) typology of grammatical copying, the grammatical innovations
of the Balkan linguistic area exclude material copying. The borrowing of grammatical morphemes is
not common in the Balkans, and neighbouring languages easily tolerate direct cross-language clash
between their phonological forms in the same semantic fields: compare ‘yes’ : ‘no’ = Bulgarian /da/ :
/ne/ = Greek /ne/ : /óχi/; ‘and’ : ‘or’ = Bulgarian /i/ : /íli/ = Greek /ke/ : /i/; ‘my’ : ‘his’ = Bulgarian /mi/
: /mu/ = Greek /mu/ : /tu/. Semantic, pragmatic, syntactic, and frequential convergence is common.
Asenova (2002: 97–104) has pointed out the very similar uses of the main prepositions, for instance, in
the Balkan languages, though the phonological forms of the prepositions are different in each case.
The main question is, though, whether such terminology as “copying”, “borrowing”, or “transfer” is
justified in the Balkans at all, given the fact that mutual reinforcement of change seems to have been
the way the most Balkanisms have originated.
In a way, the Balkans and similar areas are a linguistic analogue of the three-body problem in
physics: the methods we have are best suited to describing the interference between pairs of languages,
not among three or more languages simultaneously. Comparing Balkan Slavic and Balkan Romance,
as a pair of languages, can be useful as one approximation to the general problem, especially since
both possess an external “control group”, namely, closely related languages in other parts of Europe.
As argued by Joseph (2010: 628–629), the Balkan Sprachbund is best understood as the common
result of several smaller convergence areas.
The interactive inference between Balkan Slavic and Balkan Romance took place in what are
today Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and northern Greece. Slavic and Romance, as two branches of
the Indo-European family, shared several inherited structural features when they first came into
contact in South-Eastern Europe. As the end result of convergence processes, Balkan Slavic now has
more structural features in common with all Romance languages (not only with those spoken in the
Balkans), but Balkan Romance has clearly been affected by its Balkan environment, too. The influence
of Greek and Albanian (and the ancestral language of the latter) is strong in both. In particular, I tried
to show that the contribution of both Slavic and Romance to the Balkan feature pool of articles was
stronger than is assumed in some substratum theories, but the influence of the postpositive article of
Albanian and the linking article of Greek also has to be taken into account in the same pool. (For the
concept of feature pool, see Mufwene [2001: 4–6, 2008: 117–132] and his short illustrative
presentation of the idea in Mufwene s.a.)
From the point of view of Balkan Slavic, the grammars of Bulgarian and Macedonian look like
hybrids of “Slavic” and “Romance” grammars with some Albanian additions. Spasov (2010) compares
the structure of Macedonian with that of Molise Croatian spoken in Italy and argues that what is (in his
view mistakenly) called the “Balkanization” of Macedonian is to a large extent Romance influence.
The Romance (Aromanian) component in the “so-called Balkanization of Macedonian” is also
emphasized by Gołąb (1997); but notice that in Molise, Italian acts as the dominant language, whereas
in Macedonia Aromanian is and was an adstratum and, as emphasized by Gołąb (1997: 15), also the
substratum language in a Romance-Slavic language shift.
As I tried to show in my overview of the Balkan article systems, any reduction of the Balkan
linguistic area to a unidirectional influence from a single source, such as Balkan Romance, does not do
justice to the complex constellation of linguistic facts. It is, however, possible to say that the
significance of Balkan Romance as the initiator of some changes, such as the grammaticalization of
definiteness, may have been greater than that of Balkan Slavic, whereas Balkan Slavic “accelerated the
expansion of the contact-induced changes and strengthened typological links between particular
Balkan languages” (Topolińska 2010: 56). The different patterns of spread and settlement and the
different social histories of the Balkan languages gave them different roles in the formation of the
linguistic area. As their initial structures were typologically rather similar, the different roles they
assumed corroborate Thomason’s (2008 and earlier) arguments for the primacy of social factors over
structural factors as determinants of contact-induced change.

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