What language do people speak in the Balkans, anyway? (2019)
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
This article should be named: "What language do people in former Yugoslavian countries speak"
More than half of the Balkans are not slavic.
As for slavic languages: Croatian and Serbian are pretty much the same, and Bosnian is similar close enough. Slovenian is slightly different, then there is Bulgarian. Macedonian is just a dialect of Bulgarian language.
Non slavic languages:
Albanian - Isolate of indo-european languages (its own branch)
Greek - its own branch of indo-european languages
Romanian - Latin branch, with some Dacian (less than 2%)
Other Minor Languages: Turkish, Romani Variants, etc - (aka, i.e. not to be confused with romanian, but it is an indian origin language)
As for the whole peninsula, they share a lot of common words due to the ottoman empire's past, which is called a Balkan Sprachbund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_sprachbund
Even they might share some words, name of objects, or food dishes, A Greek, an Albanian, a Slavic, and a Romanian person will not be able to understand each other at all.
Yeah no.
In ex-Yugoslavia there is a rather pronounced distinction between citizenship and nationality. In Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH) this distinction is actually enshrined into the constitution. Moreover, in BH all official documents must be translated into 3 constituent languages. As a funny example of this see how cigarette packets look in BH [1]. In all three instances they say exactly the same thing. NOTE: Cyrillic alphabet, as used in Serbia, has an isomorphic relationship to the Croatian latin alphabet (this same latin alphabet is official in the Serbian "language" too, although it is not called Croatian). To get an entertaining idea about how complicated things are in BH see [2] or [3].
[1] https://www.globaltobaccocontrol.org/tpackss/share-pack/pack... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO0rEwwyB0g [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCEYDdMue-8
As a Yugoslav war refugee, this is spot on.
Small sidenote: Even if all of these languages are effectively one big "super-Balkan" language it is a _very_ divisive point from an ethnicity perspective given the number of conflicts this region has had over the centuries. While it's not my cup of tea, the reality is that people from the Balkans will often judge others from that region (both positively and negatively) based on these almost-imperceptible language differences since they signal to the listener some degree of ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic level, and education level.
A language is a dialect with an army.
There are, perhaps, few places where this is more true than in the Balkans. At least none come to mind.
As an anecdote, a friend once told me, that to really speak a language you must be able to understand jokes and poetry in that language. I tend to agree. With that in mind it's worth mentioning that to a great extent people from Serbia, Croatia, BH, and Montenegro listen to the same music, read the same literature, and tell the same jokes
> Serbo-Croatian – also called Serbo-Croat, Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It is a pluricentric language with four mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin.
There's also some story about how these all derive from Shtokavian via Eastern Herzegovinian, so those might be useful names too.
And, of course, how could we forget the Balkan sprachbund [2]!
A teacher at a Bronx high school once appeared among the auditors. He had come to America as a child and the entire time had never heard that Yiddish had a history and could also serve for higher matters.... Once after a lecture he approached me and asked, 'What is the difference between a dialect and language?' I thought that the maskilic contempt had affected him, and tried to lead him to the right path, but he interrupted me: 'I know that, but I will give you a better definition. A language is a dialect with an army and navy.' From that very time I made sure to remember that I must convey this wonderful formulation of the social plight of Yiddish to a large audience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
In fact its the dialect spoken by the majority of people in Croatia (even though Stokavian is the "official" Croatian) and sometimes argued to be more than just a dialect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kajkavian
Personally I always found the comparison "Croatian vs. Serbian is the same as US English vs. British" a great oversimplification. It's not just an intonation or alphabet, it's also a lot more different words (that might mean the same things) than for example between the variants of English. Yes, people understand each other - but they're also attuned to all the different dialects within the "main language groups" so they actually know/learn more words for same objects (for example Croatians will be happy to list different words for bread/tomatos/etc i.e. synonyms that they might know the meaning of but don't necessarily use daily - and those different synonyms depending on the dialect might be closer to Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Italian, Turkish, Hungarian or old Austrian).
In a way I think this invalidates the premise of the article - that there is "a peculiar form of theater going on" and that the governments are pretending by needing court translators. If the countries are using not only different alphabets, but in part also different words (even though that other surrounding countries might somewhat understand those different words) - whats a viable alternative then?
Also, doesn't your claim that BCS speakers are attuned to different dialect groups and understand their terms even further undermine the claim that there's an actual need for translation? By and large, speakers of English aren't (although thanks to Hollywood everybody knows some American), but an Aussie in NYC or a Brit in Melbourne is not going to have any real issues communicating.
Don't think that undermines my claim at all - they understand the words because they're familiar within the slavic language group in general (even though they might be derivations and used or spelled differently). Its like saying Italian/Spanish are the same because speakers might understand words between them. With the translation argument - you also of course have to ignore the fact that Serbia writes in cyrillic and Croatia in latin alphabet.
Basically, the point is about what defines a language as a distinct one.
Grammar is pretty much the same with one standard preferring one form or the other (eg. infinitive vs "da" + present). Vocabulary is over 90% identical, though I am sure top 500 words in both spoken dialects have a larger discrepancy. Alphabets are different, but they are almost bijectively mapped (only differ orthographically in digraphs like NJ/Nj/nj where Cyrillic has only Њ/њ), and you may have missed it, but Serbian population actually uses Latin script for >80% of all Serbian writing.
The article mentions a push to differentiate languages further, probably most evident in Croatia in early 90s.
But three students in Bosnia speaking identical language (grammar/vocabulary thougj the script might differ) of 3 different nationalities would officially claim they speak three different languages. If you don't see the absurdity in that, that's up to you.
There's a current dispute between Bulgaria and (North) Macedonia. Basically, Bulgaria is not willing to recognize the Macedonian language, with their vice-prime-minister recently saying it's the "Esperanto language on the Balkans". They're also veto Macedonia's EU membership negotiations. It's an ongoing, heated discussion which has (unfortunately) caused hatred between the countries (North Macedonia and Bulgaria have been mostly friendly between each other in the past).
Eastern Europe is a brewing pot of cultural diversity and history.
Macedonians regularly apply for Bulgarian citizenship if they can prove their origin is from Bulgaria, so as to get a backdoor into the EU, they get a Bulgarian passport. [1]
Eastern Europe / the Balkans are pretty complex. They have been ruled by The first and second Bulgarian Empires, The Byzantine Empire, the Roman Empire, and the Ottomans.
[1] https://www.novinite.com/articles/112811/Bulgarian+Passports....
Pretty much sums it up, but you forgot the Most Serene Republic of Venice :)
Also, it might be worth noting that although influenced by the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Albania separately broke ties with Stalin in a pretty bold move for the time.
1) It was already on the periphery of the SU sphere of influence, not central (unlike the unlucky Hungary, Czechoslovakia etc)
2) It was already agreed it will be 50:50 sphere of influence SU:US, at Yalta conference only couple of years back
3) In 1948 SU still lacked the atom bomb, while US already got it
4) Memory of WW2 still very fresh, would SU risk confrontation with US over far&away lands
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/bulgarian-passport-scam-officials-arre...
Funnily, the equivalent running joke in Serbia is that Macedonians are Serbs with a speech disorder.
Having left the Balkans, I find it very liberating, these days, when a proposal or idea of mine gets shot down, that I don't have to wonder: "Did they think I am a liar?", "Did I not articulate it over well enough?" and the like. It is such a relief, to know - it was most likely the idea, not myself.
Which is the kind of disputes big nations use to influence local policies, sell weapons, create satellite states, etc, to use for their higher-stakes disputes...
Meanwhile, the big western nations that started 2 world wars, gassed 6 million people (plus some tens of thousands of soldiers in WWI), and gone to war and occupied peoples all around the globe as colonial powers, somehow managed to even pin WWI on the Balkans (as if it was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand the cause, and not a mere pretext, the cause being western european power plays, of the same powers that were the dominant forces in the war).
The truth is, people understand each other just fine. Pushing for giving a name to "the common language" or enumerating how many "different languages" exist has little to do with linguistics.
This is also true, to an extent, for words meaning "tea".
https://qz.com/1176962/map-how-the-word-tea-spread-over-land...
So it is a bit difficult to explain. Especially since someone can be born in Bosnia/Croatia and be a Serb or vice versa
A famous historical example of this would be Nikola Tesla, no?
His family lived in the area of modern day Croatia for hundreds of years. Nikola visited Serbia only once for 31 hours in total.
Yeah - its totally confusing. If Nikola was not Croatian after his family living in the area of Croatia for 500 years, how is Novak Djokovic Serbian for just being born in Serbia (while his parents are from Montenegro and Croatia)? :)
One can argue the usefulness of any of those distinctions, but there is going to be some genetic and some cultural part to the "nation" definition (around the Balkans, it's been the religion more than anything else to define a nation — like language, I would consider that a cultural component).
You seem to be going strictly for the geographical distinction (with time a contributing factor), but that's in opposition to how nations are defined everywhere (otherwise, it's all Croatians in Croatia today and there wouldn't exist any "Irish Americans", even with Americans being already a mash-up special nation). In Serbian people try to make the distinction by using "Srbi" and "Srbijanci" (citizens), basically Serb vs Serbians, though it is a linguistic stretch (just like we've got Bosniaks/Bošnjaci for a nation to oppose it to Bosnians/Bosanci which includes anyone from Bosnia and Herzegovina).
A recent study attempted to categorize languages and found English and French to be among the most opaque, Finnish and Korean to be the most transparent, and German in the middle. [2]
Now the orthography is hard mainly due to: (1) change in the language not reflected in the writing, (2) etymological speeling choices made on standardization and (3) latent phonological information.
Instances of (1) include graphemes likes "au" [o].
Example of (2) is "pied" with final letter here to refer to Greek "podo".
Point (3) is more complex. Take "parent" were final t is mute. Its presence makes is clear it’s related to "parental". Some with pairs like "grand" / "grande" were in the feminine form the final d is pronounced.
Edit: Tibetan alphabet is notoriously difficult, and Thai alphabet is quite hard too, so the problem exists elsewhere as well even when staying in the realm of alphabets.
The French result is interesting. It was fine - not great, not terrible - on the readability score, and by far the worst on writability. (The 2nd worst, English, got 3x the writability score.) That, combined with the fact that this metric was based on how much trouble a neural net had goes a long way toward explaining why my phone can do text-to-speech in French just fine, but can't take dictation to save its life.
They're also used for grammar practice. In that case, the challenge is that there might be many written forms of the sentence that would be pronounced the same as what was said, but only one is grammatically correct.
?? I dont' quite follow what you're saying. The sound 'o' can be written in French in a lot of different ways, some of them even don't even have an 'o' in them ("au", "eau", "aux" "aux" and I probably forgot some). It's notoriously difficult to write things in French just because of the discrepancy between what you hear and what you should write.
By convention, in French every time you find written: "au", "eau", "aux" "aux" you pronounce it "o".
If you hear "o", it may be "o" or any of the above.
There may be small "nuances" like with Z in some languages that can be hard or soft (there are anyway "coded" rules - not necessarily "simple" - but only a handful of exceptions), Italian:
http://www.attori.com/dizione/Diz11.htm
Now go to English and read aloud (say):
flier
plier
pier
tier
tire
It is true that if you happened to know French well, and you are familiar with the language writing conventions you can read the language just fine, but that's tautology.
Roughly half of the letters written in French are not pronounced, either because they come too soon in the word, or because they are followed by another letter or because they are too late in the word. Unless the next word starts with specific letter, in that case you do pronounce the ending of the previous word. Sure, for a native speaker it could be very easy to read and write, and it might be determined by very consistent set of few dozen rules, but I would say that reading or writing French is anything but straightforward.
Au in French is never pronounced as it is written (like augen in German or aulico in Italian), but always as a O
Once you know the rules it's pretty easy
Also French (like Italian, Spanish and others) have accents to help you decide how to pronounce a word
Now consider these popular examples of English inconsistencies
The bandage was wound around his leg to cover his wound.
The insurance on the invalid was invalid
I did not object to the object.
Not disagreeing with your overall point, most romance language have a much easier mapping from speaking -> writing than does english, but the principle of "write as you speak" is probably the simplest you can get.
(ie, the letter 'c' is used to represent different sounds in the word 'calambre', 'chorrizo', 'proyeccion'. It's not complicated to learn at all, but you still have a one -> many mapping on the letter -> sound. For languages like Serbian, it is straight up one to one.
Cane (dog) and cena (dinner) in Italian are two examples of soft and hard C that depend on which vowel follows the letter C.
It wasn't like that originally, Roman C sounded always like K, Caesar was pronounced Kaesar (German's Kaiser comes from it).
Than middle age came and things changed, but the pronunciation stayed consistent after that
C+a, C+o, C+u = hard C
C+e, C+i = soft C
So it's not simply about "what you write is what you get" but it's the rule that is consistently the same
Phonetically the examples above are unambiguous though
Soft c = voiceless postalover affricate
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_postalveolar_affri...
hard c = Voiceless velar plosive
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_plosive
They are not exactly what you write, but they have precise phonetic symbols expressing how they sound (which is not always how they look on paper)
When you have a language that's half nordic, half french, half german, with tons of words from elsewhere, the rules aren't really going to be rules. (there is of course a much more linguistically accurate way to say this)
Especially it's false in French with 17 different ways to write "e" or "o" even though it's spoken the same...
There is an excellent TEDx video where two linguists that are advocating for a reform of the French orthography invent a word and then write a script to list all the ways it can be spelled, following the existing rules of French spelling. The result is 240 ways to spell it.
Russian has progressed/evolved more than many of the other Slavic languages (due to more speakers, being a part of an empire etc.). So there are significant differences between Russian and most other Slavic languages (even the closest ones, Ukranian and Belorussian). These differences are everywhere: in word forms, tenses, stress, pronunciation etc.
Many other Slavic languages (especially Balkanian) retain a lot of forms, sounds, meanings that are archaic by Russian standards: anything from Bulgarian `ъ` sound which disappeared from Russian centuries ago, to words like `лепа` (beautiful) in Serbian which hasn't been used in Russian for over a century, to words like Polish `uroda` (beauty) which switched its meaning to mean "ugly" in Russian.
And the list goes on: locative and vocative cases exist in Serbian, haven't existed in Russian for a long time; definiteness of Macedonian and Bulgarian hasn't existed in Russian for a long time, if ever; etc. etc.
So all in all, other Slavic speakers have a higher chance and luck understanding Russian speakers, than Russian speakers other Slavik languages.
Locative example: в саду (vs о саде) Vocative example: Маш, иди сюда
I'd guestimate at least 10% speaks both English or German relatively fluently, and I personally don't know anyone from here that speaks Russian fluently.
I am a homo sapiens, a living being from this Universe. Born on the Planet Earth. My mother and father were also homo sapiens. Their mothers and fathers too. Several million generations before, their mothers and fathers were some types of primates, who knows.
I respect the languages my mother and father and their mothers and fathers spoke and taught me, but I do not want to be limited to those.
Therefore, I also tried to learn few other languages. To name some well-known: English. Deutsch. Italian. Basic. Pascal. C. C++. Forth. Modula II. Logo. Lisp. Fortran. Cobol. Java. Javascript. Probably few more that I don't remember :)
Some of them I only studied on paper, without any direct opportunity to apply it in real life. I studied those, just for the sake of studying.
I love to listen to people speaking in many languages and I love when people use many dialects of the same language, that are so different to each other that they barely understand themselves.
Diversity should be considered a blessing.
But the only real thing that makes it possible for people to live together is uniformity. Same language, same customs, same expectations, at least same calendar.
It seems to be absolutely laughable that people from anglophone countries nowadays love to talk about diversity when they are unable to find a common ground with their rural compatriots and all their “diverse” friends are the same middle class people grown up on Hollywood movies and Rowling books.
After Yugoslavia fell apart, “they speak a different language” was used as an argument for creating different countries.
Episode 1. Growing up I picked up Serbian/Croatian without knowing, from comic books, movies (never synchronized, foreign movies subtitled only), songs and books. Got the surprise of my life 1st time I went to Belgrade (while in high school). I could understand everything spoken, I could read too. They could not understand a word I was speaking in Macedonian. And I spoke their language really badly, laghably so. ;-) It was funny.
When I visit my old home, I have the impression that the youth nowdays don't understand Serbian/Croatian as much as we did.
Episode 2. Sometime in the 90-s, I went to Sofia to see the city for the 1st time. I bought bunch of Computer Science books, the likes of The Art of Computer Programming and similar. Some bits I could understand, but all of the computer related words were translated in Bulgarian (from their English forms) and I had hard time following. Some works I could guess (remember the term for computer keyboard was similar to what we use for a piano keyboard), but looking up and translating sapped my enthusiasm for CS. :-)
These days sometimes when I hear "Macedonian is a dialect of Bulgarian", I give a news site like https://www.dw.com/bg/ a try, to see what I can understand. I recognize lots of words, the meaning of simpler sentences, news on current events news that I already am familiar with. Longer more complicated sentences, or themes I am not familiar with, I do struggle, to get the meaning of what is written.
And of course, many people in the Balkans speak far less related languages - Albanian, Romanian, Greek, Turkish, etc.
Hleb is used probably more in Serbia than in Croatia.
It's basically a pseudo-isolate.
It predates those wars by a hundred years, originating from small independent states that emerged as Ottomans were losing control over the territory.
Semiotic slavistic researchers really need to be more politicians than researchers, it's a minefield still.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Slavonic
For the pronunciation it is much closer to serbocroatian than bulgarian of today which seems strange.
The EU intends to employ 50 people to translate EU legislation into Irish [0]. That's not something that has any direct benefits: there's no one who can read Irish legalese better than English. It does have some second-order effects: if you consider it's culturally valuable to promote and preserve the Irish language, one great way to do that is to provide well paid jobs for people who learn it.
[0] https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/european-...
South-slavic, is it not?
This article should be nammed: "What language do people in former Yougoslavian countries speak"
More than half of the Balkans are no slavic.
On one hand, I'd consider it a stretch for Bulgarian/Macedonian and Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian to be considered the same language.
On the other, there's also Torlakian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torlakian_dialect), a dying dialect that's been shared between Serbians/Bulgarians/Macedonians around the border. It's considered to be a dialect of both Serbian and Bulgarian, depending on who you ask, really bluring the line between the two.
I've never heard an actual speaker of the language (or of either language, if you want), claiming that they are two separate languages. If anything, there is a tension regarding certain choices in the standardization of the orthography that are sometimes claimed to be Barcelona-centric and disregard the Valencian way of speaking. This may be true, I'm not a linguist to judge; but it might certainly justify having separate entries in e.g., websites, just like one often sees for american and european spanish and french, or for brazilian and european portuguese (which nobody claims are separate languages). Anyhow, the speech in the cities Tortosa and Castelló (on both sides of the purported boundary between the languages) is nearly identical, and very different from that of, say, Barcelona or Girona.