On the Development of the Approach to Turkisms in Bulgarian and Bosnian/Bosniak National Languages

The strong and persistent language contact with (Ottoman) Turkish to which all Balkan Slav dialects had been exposed for centuries resulted in an extensive borrowing of Turkish lexical units. Despite the fact that since the 19th century the socio-political development (de-orientalization, nation building etc.) of Balkan countries and, most of all, purist approaches in the standardization of national languages have led to a substantial decrease in the number of Turkisms, Turkish lexical heritage has remained latently present in all Slavic Balkan languages. Starting from the last decade of the 20th century an extensive revival of Turkisms can be observed especially in Bulgarian and in Bosnian/Bosniak, mainly as a consequence of the democratization of the political and social systems of Balkan countries, as well, in the case of Bosnian/Bosniak, as the creation of Bosnian/ Bosniak as the national language of the Bosnian Muslims. In order to explain what the revival of latent Turkish lexical heritage consists of in these two languages, The author has traced the different paths of development in the approach to Turkish lexical borrowings in the history of Bulgarian and Bosnian/Bosniak.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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