An insight into the history of Balkan Slavic languages. Macedonian perspective

Abstract

The aim of this article is to point to the main processes that contributed to the linguistic evolution of the South-Eastern Slavic (i.e. Macedonian and Bulgarian language dialects as well as some of the dialects of the Southern Serbia) veering off the way in which the other, more conservative, of the Slavic dialectical complexes developed. In the case of the South-Eastern Slavic, the development has been to a considerable extent driven by the so called contact changes, i.e. by the interference between languages of different typological compositions in a multilingual administrative structures that impose on the individuals not fluent in their speakers’ language the need to communicate. In consequence, this type of development uncovers the right communicative hierarchy of the transferred information and leads to regularization (grammaticalization) of the exponents of the information that is the most crucial for the successful completion of a communication act. In a verbal system, the information is connected first and foremost with the semantic domain of assessing the truth-value of the discussed facts; in a nominal system, it is the information that enables the correct identification of the discussed events and their protagonists that counts the most. These issues are presented in the article from the perspective of the evolution mechanisms characteristic of the Macedonian language area, showing how the abovementioned semantic impulses transform the grammatical (morphological and syntactical) inheritance of Proto-Slavic. What draws our attention in this relation is the analogy between the direction and the final products of the evolution of the so called Balkan sprachbund and the processes that in the late Middle Ages brought about similar results in the development of the Romance languages of the Western Europe or of English.