Languages of the Balkans
Overview of Balkan languages
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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
Germanic
- Yiddish (Slovenia, Romania)
- Austrian German (Slovenia)
Albanian
Hellenic languages
Indo-Aryan languages
Slavic languages
Eastern South Slavic
Transitional dialects
- Transitional Bulgarian dialects
- Transitional Serbo-Croatian dialects (Gorani/Torlakian)
East Slavic
Western South Slavic
- Slovene
- Serbo-Croatian with standardized varieties based on the Shtokavian dialect:
Regiolects
Romance languages
- 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
Ugric languages
Extinct languages
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