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Balkan Multilingualism in Its Historical and Contemporary context
| Multilingualism, and by extension, multiculturalism have been a hallmark of the Balkans since antiquity, although the current situation has its origins in the Ottoman period. As the European Union expands into the Balkans, however, new configurations and new challenges are arising. On the one hand, English has arguably replaced Turkish as the lingua franca of the region, although other non-Balkan languages also have specific roles in intercultural communication. Intersecting processes of language standardization and minority language rights are also influencing the picture. On the other hand, the Balkan languages are heirs to a shared linguistic heritage, first recognized as such by linguists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of which speakers themselves are often unaware. Finally, the rise of contact linguistics as a sub-discipline in linguistics and the return to typology as a major focus of linguistic endeavor have led to a new arguments attempting to conflate specifically Southeast European linguistic developments with West European trends resulting in a reinscription of old center-periphery relationships on the linguistic map of Europe. In this paper, I shall show how these phenomena can illuminate both the past and present of European linguistic policies in the larger sense.
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