Ancient Balkan Linguistics

Nestled in the heart of southeastern Europe, the Balkan Peninsula has long been a crucible of cultural, historical, and linguistic diversity. Its ancient past reveals a complex tapestry of civilizations, migrations, and interactions that have left an indelible mark on the region’s linguistic landscape. The “ancient Balkan languages” (sometimes referred to as “Paleo-Balkanic languages”) encompass various Indo-European languages spoken in pre-ancient, ancient, and possibly late ancient times alongside varieties of Greek and later Latin in the Balkan Peninsula and adjacent areas. Apart from linguistic units known from ancient literature, such as Thracian and Phrygian, they may have also included other unattested languages and dialects. Except for Ancient Greek, Albanian, and (if the relationship to this area still holds) Armenian, all languages belonging to this geographical group are termed “fragmentarily attested languages.” These languages were fully used during their documentation periods, but their attestations cannot yield a coherent picture of grammatical systems and lexicons. The fragmentary documentation is the main obstacle to their systematic interpretation because our knowledge relies only on secondary information, mostly from ancient sources, glosses, or onomastic material. Nonetheless, arranging fragmentary languages according to linguistic relationships presents additional challenges. Differing and often contradictory opinions on the nature of such languages result from the “etymological” interpretation of sparsely attested material. Attempts to combine archaeological, linguistic, and more recently genetic data (archaeogenetics) have not yet yielded satisfactory results. Synchronizing various data from different disciplines poses the main problem, along with differing methodologies and approaches in research directions, as well as the lack of common interdisciplinary terminology. This article focuses on major reference works regarding the main ancient Balkan languages and other idioms which, still used in modern times, have roots in the Balkan past. The Greek language, which genetically belongs in this context and serves as an indispensable point of reference, is only mentioned under the particular aspect of “Balkan phenomena,” leaving space to present specific problems of Greek linguistics elsewhere. Generally, only publications that make unique or historically important contributions to the study of ancient Balkan languages, or that are recent, are cited. This article includes either more recent studies or those that display linguistically informed methodology, as well as a few classic essays. Older studies are not cited, as they are often referenced in more recent work. The entries are organized by language and topics.