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# Those who enjoy studying languages will surely have come across the term Sprachbund, especially if they have ever set about the Balkan tongues
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/te-kto-uvlekaetsia-izucheniem-iazykov-naverniaka-stalkivalis-s-terminom-sprachbund-v-osobennosti-esli-prinimalis-za-balkanskie-iazyki/
- Published: 2024-02-06T14:26:23.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:34:38.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: The East, Books, Science, Education, People

*Sprachbund*, or *linguistic union*, describes similarities that arise not from the genetic kinship of languages but from close linguistic and cultural contact. Different languages with no shared basic vocabulary or morphology may nonetheless have weighty similarities in syntax, phonetics and cultural lexis: this is precisely what a Sprachbund is. The founders of the theory of linguistic unions cite as their example Albanian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, Greek, Balkan Turkish and Romani, which, by a number of features, have absorbed traits of the Turkic, Slavic [and](https://serov-rb.ru/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/2022-10-05-Guseva-Lev-Vejbert-Povest-o-lesah.jpg?ref=theparnassian.com) Romance languages. The most striking member of the Sprachbund is, perhaps, Romanian.

The term for such a community was originally proposed by the Russian linguist, historian and philosopher Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetskoy, who, after teaching at Moscow State University and the University of Rostov, became a lecturer at the Universities of Sofia and Vienna. In his classic article of 1923, "The Tower of Babel and the Confusion of Tongues", he introduces precisely this notion of linguistic unions:

> The distribution and mutual relations of cultures do not coincide with the grouping of languages. The speakers of languages belonging not merely to the same family but to the same branch may belong to different types of culture: an example illustrating this proposition is the Hungarian (or Magyar) people; the closest relatives of the Magyar language are the Vogul and Ostyak languages (in north-western Siberia), yet the culture of the Hungarians and the Vogul-Ostyak culture have absolutely nothing in common. And still the distribution and mutual relations of cultures rest, on the whole, on the same principles as the relations of languages, with the sole difference that what in culture corresponds to families is of far less significance than what corresponds to unions. The cultures of neighbouring peoples always present a whole series of features resembling one another. Thanks to this, certain cultural and historical zones are marked out among these cultures, for example in Asia the zone of Muslim, Hindustani, Chinese, Pacific, steppe, Arctic and other cultures. The boundaries of all these zones intersect, so that cultures of a mixed or transitional type are formed. Individual peoples and parts of peoples specialise a given cultural type, introducing into it their own specific individual peculiarities. The result is the same rainbow-coloured network, single and harmonious by virtue of its continuity, and at the same time infinitely varied by virtue of its differentiation.

But the most interesting thing is that, in speaking of the similarities and differences of languages and cultures, he comes out against a single universal human culture, and formulates a clear manifesto against anti-globalism as a blasphemous and godless idea. Indeed, if one looks at the globalists, all their actions turn out, with surprising precision, to be unnatural, godless and ultimately sinful:

> Amid an apparently anarchic diversity, the individual national cultures, each preserving its own unrepeatable individual character, represent in their totality a certain continuous, harmonious unity of the whole. They cannot be synthesised by abstracting from their individual character, for it is precisely in the coexistence of these vividly individual cultural and historical units that the foundation of the unity of the whole lies. Like everything natural, everything that flows from the laws of life and development established by God, this picture is majestic in its unfathomable and boundless complexity and, together with it, its complex harmony. And the attempt to destroy it with human hands, to replace the natural organic unity of living, vividly individual cultures with the mechanical unity of an impersonal universal human culture, leaving no room for the manifestations of individuality and wretched in its abstract remoteness from life, is plainly unnatural, godless and blasphemous