Macedonian And Kosovian Turkish Dialects In Terms Of Language Interaction

In spite of the fact that the Turkish clans, nomads and tribes who settled in the Thrace and the Balkans starting from the mid-fourteenth century did not make concessions from their own languages and dialects, within the centuries they also had a mutual interaction language-wise with the Slavic tribes who were the local people of the conquered land. The language interaction experienced within a bilingual or a multilingual environment through the centuries both included many Turkish elements in the Bulgarian, Greek, Serbian, Croatian, Albanian, etc. languages and led to many foreign inclusions in the Rumelian Turkish dialects in terms of vocabulary and syntax. Therefore, in that land Rumelian Turks lived through a process of forming dialect(s) which are new and different from the Anatolian dialects under the influence of various foreign languages mostly of Slavic origin. The Rumelian Turkishness, which was the dominant factor of the region in political and demographic terms until the Balkan Wars and the First World War, was turned into a minority in every aspect in that land after those dates. This eventually brought about a process that was not in favor of the Turkish language. In this paper, Macedonian and Kosovian Turkish dialects which make up the western branch of the Rumelian dialects differentiating from the Anatolian ones in many ways are dealt with in terms of language interaction and bilingualism/multilingualism; language interference or code change observed in the phonetics, morphology, vocabulary and syntax of these dialects are highlighted as well.

Keywords

Rumelian dialects, Anatolian dialects, phonetics, morphology, vocabulary, syntax, language interacti