Wikipedia / Languages of the Balkans
Wikipedia / Languages of the Balkans
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
Northwestern Arvanitika
Southcentral Arvanitika
Thracian Arvanitika
Hellenic languages
Indo-Aryan languages
Slavic languages
Eastern South Slavic
Transitional dialects
East Slavic
Western South Slavic
Serbo-Croatian with standardized varieties based on the Shtokavian dialect:
Regiolects
Romance languages
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)
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)
Phrygian (perhaps related with Hellenic languages)
See also