Tracking Sprachbund Boundaries: Word Order in the Balkans

Abstract

As Thomason and Kaufman have noted in their classic survey, "Sprachbund situations are notoriously messy" (1988: 95). This is largely because in a situation of multilateral multilingualism, it is next to impossible to make an unambiguous determination, either in general or in any one particular instance, of either the source or the direction of interference. Often the best (and only thing) one can do is to list the shared features which could possibly be due to convergent change. In the case of the "world's most famous contact situation" (ibid.), the Balkan Sprachbund, scholars have almost consistently ventured far beyond this cautiously stated boundary. Lists of shared features have been taken as an implicit claim (and even sometimes as clear proof) that contact phenomena are the source of the several language-specific changes which in each instance produced these shared features; this in turn has led to claims that a particular language has provided the source from which the others have borrowed. Not surprisingly, such claims are often made by linguists whose native language is the one claimed as source.2