Albanians in Ukraine: Albanian “standard” language vs Albanian lect and identity in the 21st century

The author analyzes ethno-cultural processes among the Albanians in Ukraine during the last two decades. He especially focuses on the attempts to save the Albanian dialect that the community undertakes. The study pays attention to the revitalization of traditional culture what is perceived by the locals as a continuation of Albanian cultural code in the Western Balkans. The research is focused on the transformation of identity and positionality of the Albanians of Budjak and the Azov Sea region surrounded by poly-ethnic settlements in the globalizing word.

Language choice and codeswitching in the Balkan polylogue (a case of the bilingual community of Velja Gorana, Montenegro)

The article describes strategies of language choice and codeswitching (CS) in the Slavic-Albanian bilingual community, which lives in the village of Velja Gorana in the south of Montenegro. An attempt has been made to find out how individual features of communicants (age, sex, origin, linguistic competence, etc.) influence the presence or absence of CS, and what conventions and rules governing the language choice and CS exist in the community. The study is based on dialogues and polylogues with the participation of monolingual and bilingual speakers, recorded during the field trips in Velja Gorana in the years 2014 and 2015.

Bulgarian verbal clichés as communicative acts in the Balkan time and space

The article sheds light on the Balkan and Slavic components of the Bulgarian traditional verbal clichés and their metamorphoses in the situations when the oppositions “my own / somebody else’s” are of special relevance (languages and dialects, confessions, gender, age, diaspora, etc.). The current tendencies of transforming the verbal formulae with regard to globalization and the development of Internet-communication, growth of poly-ethnic societies as a result of emigration and other factors are studied.

Language as the main element of the ethnic identity of the Pontic Greeks in the cyber space

The paper makes an attempt to research the consolidating ethnic communities in popular social networks on the example of the “Vkontakte” network. The main elements of the basic ethnic identity of the Pontic Greeks in the social media publics are the ethnic language (Modern Greek or Pontic dialect), music and dances, specific dishes of national cuisine, religion, and characteristics of the family-clan organization. The Pontic dialect is used to create the most popular memes. The language choice for a meme depends on the specific features of the image used as a basis. A large number of young subscribers have a command of Pontic dialect, and can show not only a passive knowledge of common phrases, but also can comment on memes in the discussion that develops in the dialect.

Balkan bilingualism: Some notes on the margins

This article based on the field records of the bilingual conversations in the Albanian-Greek contact zones scrutinizes the processes of development of the Balkan Sprachbund. The author argues that bilingualism maintains comprehension and guarantees preservation of the idioms which serve as vivid markers of self-identification.

Metalinguistic comments in the Slavic speech of Albania

In diesem Artikel werden folgende Arten des metasprachlichen Kommentierens in der slavischen Rede in Albanien untersucht: Sprachbezeichnungen, komplexe narrativ-strukturierende Formeln, sprachliche Präsuppositionen, metasprachliche Markierung von einzelnen Wörtern und Konstruktionen, die durch die gemeinsamen/unterschiedlichen Sprachkompetenzen des Sprechers und des Interviewers bedingt sind.

Ritual dialogues of Yuletide in the Carpathian Region of Ukraine

Ritual dialogues have interested several prominent scholars of Slavic folklore as source for reconstruction of proto-Slavic ritual text structure. More recent studies of folklore have a different focus, studying the structure of Slavic societies reflected in folklore. This article introduces a number of ritual dialogues traditionally performed in villages in the Carpathian area of Western Ukraine around Yuletide, recorded by one of the authors between 1987 and 2018, and analyses the dialogues from both these points of view. A number of examined dialogues show specific structural patterns (question-answer-interpretation structure, the positions of the male performer outside the house, and the female performer, inside, etc.) agreeing with Propp’s hypothesis about the Yuletide blessings of the house given by ancestral spirits coming from the otherworld in East Slavic culture, and with Toporov’s hypothesis about Yuletide riddles performed in Indo-European culture to re-create world order at the time of winter solstice. Carpathian dialogs also turn out to reflect and corroborate the gender-age hierarchy of the traditional rural society.