Volume 2006, Issue 179

Language policy failure can come at a high price. From 1984 to 1986, the Communist Party of Bulgaria attempted a forced “nationalization” of its minorities, Turks were specifically targeted; names were to be Slavicized and Bulgarian was to be the only language allowed in public places; even Turkish newspapers were closed down. This special issue of IJSL examines the collapse of that language policy and how the attempt to carry it out reverberates through Bulgarian and Balkan politics, affecting Bulgarian minorities and their counterparts in adjacent nations. As a case of a failed language policy with mild repercussions — after 1989, more severe failures occurred in other Balkan nations, several suffered armed conflict and “ethnic cleansing” — such extreme measures did not occur in Bulgaria; its relationships with its minorities remain more exemplary for other nations in the overcoming of harsh policies and avoidance of civil war.

The special attention that this article devotes to Bulgarian Muslim Turks is due to at least three important issues: first, this is the second largest ethnic and religious group in the country after the Bulgarian Christian majority, and the problems of this community involve a large portion of the population; second, geopolitical circumstances make this group a significant factor for Bulgaria; third, the Islamic religion is of growing political importance in the world: all of these determine some of the emphasis in the following discussion. We have focused specially on the characteristics and regularities of the neighborhood of the Muslim community with the majority; the reverse connection is examined as a correlative; comparisons with other religious communities have been made only if necessary for specific comparisons.

This article presents the language of Muslim Roms, who form a trilingual community in the northeastern part of Bulgaria, discussing language mixing between Romani, Turkish, and Bulgarian, applying the model of Myers-Scotton (1993). Two different Roma linguistic groups are observed: speakers of Vlax (Zagondzi) and non-Vlax (Xoraxani). The non-Vlax language, which is full of Turkish loanwords, is more prestigious than the Vlax language, which is more conservative, but both show almost the same patterns of language mixing. The study argues for the connection between language mixing and language prestige and looks at the question: Why do Roma speakers use elements from other languages when speaking Romani?

The Gypsies and their language have been an object of attention for centuries. Numerous accounts describing their arrival in a particular area attest to the fascination of local people with what they regarded as an unintelligible language. These “strange” nomads and their language have attracted the attention of a number of researchers. Attempts to describe their dialects can be found even in some of the earliest records related to the Roma.

Kinship ties between Bulgarians and Russians have aroused heated debate concerning the essence of Slavdom and the common ancestry of at least ten nationalities today in Eastern Europe. Russians and Ukrainians, incomparably, are more numerous and populate larger territories than the Southern Slavs. Viewed from historical perspective, however, the importance of these less numerous peoples — Bulgarians, Serbs, Croats — is not proportional to contemporary situations. In earlier periods — from the 10th through the 14th centuries — the now smaller nations, due to location and other circumstances, were more active in cultural and political contacts. Especially for the Balkans in the Early Middle Ages, the direction of cultural influence was from southwest toward the northeast. Over the next centuries, the migration of people and ideas repeatedly changed direction, while in the 18th and 19th centuries, the influence of the Russian Empire gave a crucial impetus to formation of national self-identity among Balkan Slavic-speaking nationalities.

The settlement of Armenians on Bulgarian territory dates back to Armenians in the service of the Byzantine army, later to numerous settlements of Armenian military, and the growth of Paulicianism, a heresy created mainly by Armenians and Syrians. Mass immigration started in the beginning of the 17th century, when an economic and political crisis developed in Ottoman Armenia. After Bulgaria's 1878 Liberation from Ottoman rule, there were 4,000 Armenians in the Principality of Bulgaria and 1,300 in Eastern Rumelia, according to an 1884 census. Waves of refugees fled to Bulgaria after the 1896 and 1915 genocides. During the rule of Kemal Atatürk and after the 1919–1922 Greco-Turkish War, the Armenians were compelled to seek refuge beyond Turkey. On the orders of the Alexander Stamboliiski government, Bulgaria opened its borders to refugees in 1922, and approximately 25,000 Armenians settled in the country. Today there are 13,000 Armenians in Bulgaria, with their own churches, schools, newspapers and cultural life in many cities such as Plovdiv, Sofia, Shumen, etc.

This article aims to trace the presence of Jews on Bulgarian territory since ancient times without subscribing to preconceived theses. Naturally, the issue of Jewish migration cannot be discussed without due consideration for the relations with the respective states and their peoples: Byzantium, the mediaeval Bulgarian empires, the Ottoman Empire, the post-Liberation Kingdom of Bulgaria and contemporary Bulgaria. It focuses on the historical periods which have had a direct bearing on the present state of the small Jewish community in Bulgaria today. This community has several distinctive features that are immediately obvious. In Bulgaria there are no adherents of various Israelite religious sects, even though the false messiah Sabbatai Zwi, whose followers ultimately adopted Islam, lived on Bulgarian territory. A Chabad rabbi from the US recently went to Bulgaria, but Chasidism has never had followers in Bulgaria. Despite the very high level of integration of Jews into Bulgarian society and the comparatively strong goodwill and tolerance of Bulgarians for Jews, Zionism became popular very early on and has undoubtedly been one of the factors for the emigration of around 90% of the Jews to Israel; the contemporary Jewish community in Bulgaria is increasingly bonding with the State of Israel and departing from the traditions brought from Spain.

The Aromânians are one of the small ethnic groups in Bulgaria: an ancient Balkan people which, as a result of migration and the vicissitudes of history, dispersed across the Balkan Peninsula, creating diasporas in Macedonia, Greece, Albania, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania. In the course of migration, the Aromânians preserved traditional trades, the majority employed in nomadic sheep and horse breeding, which eventually evolved into transhumant and Alpine. Another part practiced trade, crafts, industry and inn-keeping. All are Eastern Orthodox Christians. The Romanian origin of the Aromânian language is undisputed and universally acknowledged; however, scholars are divided over the question of the origins of the Aromânians. The existing theories may be classified in two groups: the first group, the Aromânians are descended from Roman colonists (legionnaires, veterans, administration) from the Balkan provinces of the Roman Empire; the second holds that they are Thracians, Illyrians, Paeonians, Epirotes and other Balkan peoples Romanized during the military campaign of the Roman consul, Paullus Aemilius, in 168 B.C.E., who routed the Macedonian phalanxes of the last Macedonian king, Perseus, in the battle at Pydna. Scholars also acknowledge another undisputable fact; at the time the Aromânians first attracted academic interest, in the late 18th and early 19th century, they were a relatively compact group in the mountainous regions of present-day northwestern Greece, southwestern Macedonia, Thessaly and Epirus. and southeastern Albania.

The question of the language of Bulgarian Muslims (Pomaks) is discussed by most authors in the context of minority rights or historical and cultural-ethnographic studies. Their conclusions and theses have served to justify assimilatory and brutal policies towards Muslims by the respective Greek or Bulgarian governments, the use of religion as an instrument of assimilation by the Turkish authorities, or development of an intermediate (autonomous) stage in Pomak identity for the purpose of subsequent assimilation. It is generally believed that in the Rhodopi Mountains there are various Bulgarian (South-Slavic) dialects that existed before the emergence of modern nation-states and their corresponding literary languages. The contemporary linguistic self-identification of the Chech population is directly related to social status. A large number of people with lower social status identify their native language as Pomak on the basis of its difference from Standard Bulgarian and Standard Turkish. This group is characterized by more conservative religious leanings, as a result of which they tend to distance themselves from Christians and mainly from Bulgarians. On the other hand, they identify themselves differently from the Turkish ethnic community despite the common religion. In this sense, they all (irrespective of social status) reject any Turkish connection in terms of language. Among people with high social status there is a small group that points out its non-Bulgarian identity; the members of this group are associated in some way with the Turkish or Muslim idea.

Bulgarian historical and linguistic literature has long since adopted the term “Paulicians” to designate Catholic Bulgarians who believed in the Paulician-Bogomil heresy until around the mid-17th century. Today, as was the case ninety years ago, the traditional term “Paulicians” has only a scientific and historical meaning. The majority of Catholic Bulgarians who resettled in the area of Banat and near Bucharest in Romania after the 1688 Chiprovitsi Uprising and later are descended from Paulicians. Some of the “Banat” and “Bucharest” Bulgarians returned to their home country after the 1878 Liberation and settled in Northern Bulgaria. The dualistic heresy of Paulicianism originated from Manichaeanism, which emerged in the 3rd century. After the Turkish conquest of Bulgaria, “Paulicians” came to be used as a general term for heretics, whereas the term “Bogomils” became obsolete. In the first half of the 17th century, the majority of Paulicians adopted Catholicism. The beginning of the Catholics is associated with the activities of missionaries from the Catholic Franciscan Order, who were intermediaries between Chiprovets and the Roman congregation. Saxon Catholic miners lived in Chiprovets at that time. The Catholic bishopric was based in Sofia. Part of the Catholicized Paulicians subsequently renounced Catholicism and converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

The saga of Bulgarian education tells about the birth, growth and metamorphoses of Bulgarian national identity. It started in the 9th century a.c.e. but the part that best explains what we are today happened in the last hundred and fifty years. The fifty years in the 19th century comprise several decades before the Russo-Turkish war of 1878, when Bulgaria broke free from the Ottoman Empire, and another couple of decades after, which lay the foundations of the modern Bulgarian state. The building process lasted till the communist takeover in 1944. What followed was another half century of difficult growth and permutations, induced by a complex interplay of internal and external factors.

Maya Pencheva: Chovekât v ezika. Ezikât v choveka [Man in language. Language in man]. Sofia: St. Kliment Ohridski University Press, 1998. 428 pp. (Mihail Videnov) Andrei Danchev. Sâpostavitelno ezikoznanie [Contrastive linguistics]. Sofia: St. Kliment Ohridski University Press, 2001. 224 pp. (Dimitar Vesselinov)

Both within the Ambonese community, and in scholarly discourse, it is frequently noted that Muslim villages in Maluku have retained their indigenous languages ( bahasa tanah ‘language of the land’) whereas Christian villages have not. This article sketches the historical and sociological background of this difference, principally an outcome of colonial and religious policy by the Dutch administration. On the basis of current evidence of linguistic vitality in two communities on Ambon Island, one Christian (Allang) and one Muslim (Tulehu), we suggest that the crucial factor in the maintenance of indigenous languages in Muslim villages was not religion itself, but the lesser engagement of these communities with colonizers and other outside influences vis-à-vis Christian villages. Now that such influences are having a significant impact on Muslim communities, the trajectory of language loss is similar to that already experienced in Christian villages. We also discuss changing attitudes to indigenous languages as a result of the recent intercommunal violence in Maluku and suggest that these attitudes may have an impact on the fate of the surviving languages.