Luisa on the Balkan Sprachbund

Diglossia as the source of similarity across languages.

Now out in Language Ecology, "Language contact in the Balkan Sprachbund: A study of transparency in Bulgarian, Romanian, Russian, Italian and Greek," from Luisa Seguin. The paper is based on Luisa's Masters thesis from the University of Amsterdam, written under the supervision of Kees Hengeveld and Roland Pfau. The paper, abstracted below, argues on the basis of comparative analysis of twenty-four aspects of five languages that recurring properties of languages in the Sprachbund are best explained as deriving from Koine Greek via diglossia. 

Language Contact in the Balkan Sprachbund

This study investigates the meaning-form interface in the Balkan Sprachbund (BS), by researching five different languages: Italian, Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Greek. I consider two models that account for recurring properties of the relevant languages in the Sprachbund: convergence and diglossia. If convergence is the cause behind shared features typical of the BS, that predicts that Bulgarian and Romanian would be more transparent than Russian and Italian. Under the diglossic analysis, Koine Greek is assumed to be the source of shared features, which predicts that the BS languages, Romanian, Bulgarian and Greek, would be similar. To compare the two models, I investigate twenty-four opacity features, divided into five categories: Redundancy (one-to-many), Fusion (many-to-one), Discontinuity (one meaning split in two or more forms), Form-based Form (forms with no semantic counterpart: zero-to-one), and a group of typical BS features. The results are consistent with the diglossia model: Romanian, Bulgarian and Greek manifest similar features, which points in the direction of diglossia as the underlying cause of language similarity.