The Balkan Peninsula is a world-famous multicultural and multilingual area, and has a millennial recorded history. It is situated on the fringe of the Mediterranean region, which has been thoroughly studied by philologists and anthropologists, and shares with it many cultural characteristics. Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Islam are well rooted in the Balkans and have contributed to the proliferation of different writing systems: the Greek, Latin, Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets and the Arabic script. The Balkan nations and their languages bear the imprints of the rise and fall of three empires that ruled for centuries over the region: the Roman, the Byzantine and the Ottoman empires. Austro-Hungary made its presence count in the northwest of the peninsula. Although only part of the Balkans was technically included in the Soviet sphere of influence, the disintegration of the USSR strongly affected the whole region, which thereafter underwent dramatic social and political changes. Western Europe, while appropriating the Classic legacy of the Balkans, has always been wary of their later developments, treating them as its prototypical Other.

Besides being a distinct geopolitical entity with a fascinating history and culture, this region is also the locus of Balkan linguistics, an academic discipline with its own theoretical discourse going back to the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries and to work by Johann E. Thunmann (1746-1778), Jernej Kopitar (1790-1844) and Franz Miklosich (1813-1891). During this period insiders and outsiders voiced with growing certainty the insight that all that superficial linguistic diversity that characterizes the Balkans masks an underlying unity, which seems to be the doing of one ubiquitous driving force working behind the scenes. The official starting point of Balkan linguistics is considered to be Kristian Sandfeld’s Linguistique balkanique – problèmes et résultats (Paris: Mouton, 1930), which summarized and systematized the results of the considerable research that had been conducted until that time. Balkan linguistics studies the similarities in morphosyntax, semantics, vocabulary and phonology found in the Balkan standard languages, which belong to various Indo-European branches (Albanian, Greek, Romance and Slavic), as well as their regional varieties and the languages spoken by minorities in the area (Romani, Judeo-Spanish, Gagauz, Balkan Turkish etc.). These similarities, called “balkanisms” and considered to be the outcome of convergent development due to centuries of language contact, have been presented in a number of surveys and comprehensive studies. Numerous contributions targeting specific aspects of the interactions of the Balkan languages have been published as separate monographs and in specialized international journals, many of them interdisciplinary. Situated at the intersection of genetic, areal and typological linguistics, Balkan linguistics builds on their achievements and contributes to them. The computer era has opened new perspectives for the corpus-based study of authentic Balkan language use and the statistical analysis of linguistic variation over time and space.

About this conference series

The Balkan and South Slavic series of conferences was initiated in 1978 by a small group of Balkan linguists at the University of Chicago. A conference has been held every two years since then at a location in North America: University of Chicago (1978, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996 – BSS I, II, IV, VI, VIII, X), Indiana University, Bloomington (1982, 1986, 1994 – BSS III, V, IX), University of Toronto (1990 – BSS VII), University of Arizona, Tucson (1998 – BSS XI), University of Kansas (2000 – BSS XII), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2002 – BSS XIII), The University of Mississippi (2004 – BSS XIV) and University of California, Berkeley (2006 – BSS XV). BSS XVI will thus be just the second to be held in Canada. The majority of participants come from North American universities but international participation is on the rise. Although most papers are in linguistics, there has been consistent representation from other fields of interdisciplinary humanities research, particularly in literary, film, folklore and cultural studies.

Major surveys and overviews

Without being exhaustive, the following list gives an idea of the international scope of this linguistic discipline and its thematic breadth:

Helmut W. Schaller, Die Balkansprachen. Eine Einführung in die Balkanphilologie (Heidelberg, 1975)

Radoslav Katičcicć and Mate Križzman, Ancient Languages of the Balkans (The Hague, 1976)

Agnija V. Desnickaja, Grammatičceskij stroj balkanskikh iazykov: issledovanija po semantike grammatičceskikh form [Grammatical Organization of the Balkan Languages: Studies of the Semantics of Grammatical Forms] (Leningrad, 1976)

Georg R. Solta, Einführung in die Balkanlinguistik mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Substrats und des Balkanlateinischen, (Darmstadt, 1980)

Emanuele E. Banfi, Linguistica balcanica (Bologna, 1985), Jacques Feuillet, La linguistique balkanique (Paris, 1986)

Petia Asenova, Balkansko ezikoznanie. Osnovni problemi na balkanskija ezikov sŭjuz [Balkan Linguistics: Fundamental Problems of the Balkan Sprachbund] (Sofia, 1989¹; V. Tŭrnovo 2002²)

Tat’jana V. Civ’jan, Lingvističceskie osnovy balkanskoj modeli mira [Linguistics Foundations of the Balkan Model of the World] (Moscow, 1990)

Norbert Reiter, Grundzüge der Balkanologie: ein Schritt in die Eurolinguistik (Berlin & Wiesbaden, 1994)

Uwe Hinrichs (ed.), Handbuch der Südosteuropa-Linguistik (Wiesbaden, 1999)

Major current periodicals

Balkan Studies (Institute for Balkan Studies, Thessalonike, 1960-)

Balcanica (Serbian Academy of Sciences, Belgrade, 1970-)

Balkanistica (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1974-)

Études balkaniques: cahiers Pierre Belon (Paris: De Boccard, 1994-)

Linguistique balkanique (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, 1959-)

Revue des études sud-est européennes (Romanian Academy of Sciences, Bucharest, 1963-)

Slavjanskoe i balkanskoe jazykoznanie (Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 1975-)

Zeitschrift für Balkanologie (Munich: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 1962-)

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Revue internationale des études balkaniques (Serbian Academy of Sciences, Belgrade, Vol. 1-6, 1934-1938)