The Balkan Comparative Phonetics Project

 

 

Contents




 

Description

 

In this project we develop a comparative phonetic study of the languages in the Balkan peninsula of southeastern Europe, languages which collectively have a long history of mutual structural influence due to intimate and sustained contact among their speakers.  We focus here on the phonetics of these languages, examining the acoustic and articulatory properties of their recognized segment inventories, and working towards a full documentation, description, and analysis, both synchronic and diachronic, of these sounds, taking the languages individually but, crucially also, compared against one another.  The languages of the Balkans, and especially the subset of them that form the well- known Balkan 'Sprachbund' (or 'linguistic area') -- Albanian, Aromanian, Bulgarian, Greek, Macedonian, Romanian, Romany, and southeastern (Torlak) Serbian, and to a lesser extent Turkish, and to an even lesser extent Judezmo -- are famous for the numerous convergences they show of a structural nature.  Most typically, these involve aspects of the morphosyntax and lexicon of each language, but only rarely, or else on a highly localized basis, is convergence of a phonological nature to be found.  In this way, the Balkans are somewhat different from other contact areas such as South Asia or the Pacific Northwest of North America, where phonological features seem to have spread widely. In this project we investigate an aspect of the Balkan Sprachbund that has not received due attention in the past.  Previous studies of a comparative nature involving sound-based convergences in the Balkans have not availed themselves of the analytic tools of instrumental phonetics.  Even if previously undetected convergent features are not uncovered, we see the investigation itself as being a crucial, and heretofore missing part, of a full approach to Balkan linguistics, and by extension to descriptive phonetics, contact linguistics, language interference studies, and general historical linguistics. Data collected in this project can also be useful to scholars of Slavic and Romance languages in general (not just Balkan Slavic or Balkan Romance) by offering important points of comparison within those language groups, to researchers in second-language acquisition (via what it will say, or not say, about phonetic/phonological interference), and to those engaged in experimental phonetics (by offering a wide database on the production of sounds in understudied languages).

 

Acknowledgement. This material is based upon work supported by the Slavic and East European Language Resource Center (SEELRC). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of SEELRC.

 

Researchers

Languages                                                                                                                                            

 

  • Albanian
  • Bulgarian                                                          *** Click on the flag to listen to examples ***
  • Bosnian
  • Croatian
  • Greek
  • Judezmo
  • Macedonian
  • Romanian
  • Romani
  • Serbian
  • Slovenian
  • Turkish
  • Aromanian

Papers

  1. “Inventory of Affricates and Related Sounds in the Balkans”, Georgios Tserdanelis, Brian D. Joseπh, & Nadia El-Yousseph; to be submitted to Balkanistica.

  2. “On the Representation of Affricates in the IPA”, Georgios Tserdanelis & Brian D. Joseph; to be submitted to the Journal of the IPA

  3. “Balkan Comparative Phonetics”, Georgios Tserdanelis & Brian D. Joseph; to be submitted to Zeitschrift fuer Balkanologie.

Presentations

1.      “On the phonetic description and IPA notation of affricates”. Poster presented at the 80th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA 2006). Albuquerque, NM. Download entire poster in PDF here.

2.      “Comparative Balkan Phonetics: Where Greek fits in” . Paper presented at the 7th International Conference of Greek Linguistics (ICGL 2005). York, England. Download handout in WORD here. 

3.      “A comparative Balkan phonetic project: justification and benefits”. Paper presented at the Southeast European Studies Association, Biennial Conference (SEESA 2005). Columbus, OH. Download a table from the handout in PDF here.