Standardization in Balkan Slavic Diachronic Research

Abstract

The present paper studies the problem of standardization of Bulgarian within the context of the emergence of the Balkan Sprachbund. Traditionally, standardization is considered to be a part of the nation-building process, understood as the codification of orthographic and other linguistic norms in authoritative documents. As they are legally binding within the national collective, the traditional view distinguishes texts from the era before standardization containing more dialectal phenomena and the standardized literature, where dialectal features are usually suppressed. This study presents the hypothesis that the codification of the Bulgarian language in the 19th century did not have such an impact on the later development of language norms. Rather, the codification merely led to changes in orthography. Other norms of the literary language gradually developed within the manuscript tradition of the so-called damaskini. This hypothesis is supported by a quantitative analysis of a sample of texts from various centuries and dialectal areas.