Languages of the Balkans
Appearance
This is a list of languages spoken in the Balkan countries. With the exception of several Turkic languages and Hungarian, all of them belong to the Indo-European family. Despite belonging to four different families of Indo-European; Slavic, Romance, Greek, and Albanian, a subset of these languages is notable for forming a well-studied Balkan sprachbund, a group of languages that have developed some striking structural similarities over time.
Indo-European languages
[edit]Germanic
[edit]- Yiddish (Slovenia, Romania)
- Austrian German (Slovenia)
Albanian
[edit]Hellenic languages
[edit]Indo-Aryan languages
[edit]Slavic languages
[edit]Eastern South Slavic
[edit]Transitional dialects
[edit]- Transitional Bulgarian dialects
- Transitional Serbo-Croatian dialects (Gorani/Torlakian)
East Slavic
[edit]Western South Slavic
[edit]- Slovene
- Serbo-Croatian with standardized varieties based on the Shtokavian dialect:
Regiolects
[edit]Romance languages
[edit]- Aromanian
- Istriot (in western Istria)
- Istro-Romanian (In eastern Istria)
- Italian (on the Adriatic coast)
- Ladino (in Greece, Turkey, Bosnia, Serbia, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania)
- Megleno-Romanian (Meglenenitic)
- Romanian
- Moldovan
Turkic languages
[edit]
Ugric languages
[edit]Extinct languages
[edit]These are the extinct languages that were spoken in the Balkans in classical antiquity:
- Illyrian (perhaps related with Albanian language)
- Thracian
- Dacian
- Phrygian (perhaps related with Hellenic languages)
- Paeonian
- Dalmatian
- Eteocretan
- Eteocypriot
- Lemnian
- Liburnian