Broad vs. Localistic Dialectology, Standard vs. Dialect: The Case of the Balkans and the Drawing of Linguistic Boundaries

1. Preliminaries Dialectology as a scientific pursuit is interested in charting and accounting for the range and spread of similarities and differences—that is to say, variation—within languages, and where appropriate, across languages too. As such, dialectology and the study of dialects more generally intersect in several ways with Balkan linguistics, the study of the interactions among various Aromanian (a close relative of Daco-Romanian spoken mostly in Greece and Macedonia), Daco-Romanian (the language of Romania), Romani (the language of the Gypsies (Rom)), and Turkish—that show structural parallels linking them in a particular type of contact zone known as a " Sprachbund ". First, there can be dialect divisions within a language that indicate that one dialect or dialect area of a language has been influenced by neighboring Balkan languages while other dialects have not, or have not to the same extent. This is the case, for instance, with the Torlak dialects of Serbian, located in the southeastern part of Serbia, where it has been affected by contact with speakers of other South Slavic languages, specifically Bulgarian and Macedonian, to the extent that it has many features more like those languages and less like the rest of Serbian,