There have been many instances of intense language contact between members of the Romance and Slavic language families over the last centuries. Within the two philological traditions, however, the linguistic research of specific cases of language contact has often only had a marginal position.
The goal of our self-organized working group is to integrate our individual research on the contact of Romance and Slavic languages in the Balkans into an institutionalised, academic frame. Our desideratum is a scientific network as well as a closer collaboration between the PhD students of the Romance and the Slavic department of the University of Zurich interested in the topic. In addition, this self-organised working group can serve as a point of departure for more regular collaborations between interested PhD students and scholars from the above-mentioned departments (e.g. as a Special Interest Group within the UFSP Language and Space) as well as with scholars from abroad in a long-term.
In the context of the working group, we want to collaborate by working on a common project: studying the instances of language contact between the Romance and Slavic languages both in their historic development and synchronous contact. For this, we want to analyze historical texts (lives of saints, apocryphal stories), which were translated to early modern varieties of Aromanian, Bulgarian and Daco-Romanian from both archaic (Church Slavonic, Greek, Latin) and modern (Croatian, Italian) varieties, as well as present-day recordings of multilingual informants (Aromanian, Istriot, Istro-Venetian).
Members of the Group: