The Balkan Sprachbund:

A multi-variate approach to the ‘prototypical’ case of language

contact

Olivier Winistörfer
(University of Zurich, Switzerland)
olivier-andreas.winistoerfer@uzh.ch

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 cross-
linguistic 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 pre-
sented 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 ap-
proaches 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.

References
Birchall, J. T. R. (2014). Argument marking patterns in South American languages. Utrecht: LOT.
Dryer, M. S., & Haspelmath, M. (Eds.). (2013). WALS Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology. Retrieved from https://wals.info/
Friedman, V. A., & Joseph, B. D. (2017). Reassessing sprachbunds: A view from the Balkans. In
The Cambridge handbook of areal linguistics (pp. 55–87). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Haspelmath, M. (2010). Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic studies.
Language, 86 (3), 663–687.
Kopitar, J. (1829). Albanische, walachische u. bulgarische Sprache. Jahrbücher der Literatur, 46 ,
59/106.
Nichols, J., Witzlack-Makarevich, A., & Bickel, B. (2013). The AUTOTYP genealogy and geography
database: 2013 release. Zurich: University of Zurich.
Sandfeld, K. (1930). Linguistique balkanique: problèmes et résultats (No. 31). Paris: E. Champion.
Thomason, S. G. (2000). Linguistic areas and language history. Studies in Slavic and General
Linguistics, 28 , 311–327.
Tomić, O. M. (2006). Balkan Sprachbund morpho-syntactic features (Vol. 67). Dordrecht, The
Netherlands: Springer.
Trubetzkoy, N. S. (1930). Proposition 16. Über den Sprachbund. In C. de Boer, A. G. Cornelis,
& A. G. van Ginneken (Eds.), Actes du Premier Congrès International des Linguistes à La
Haye, du 10–15 Avril 1928 (pp. 17–18). Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff.