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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Language in Central Europe: An Overview

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The linguistic picture of Central Europe, as we know it, started forming in the 6th to 9th centuries. The coming of the Slavs (or rather the spread of their language and way of life to unrelated various ethnic groups) marks the beginning of this caesura that largely closed in 896 AD when the Magyars crossed the Carpathians into Pannonia. This event gradually divided the hypothetically continuous area of Slavic settlement into a southern section, extending from contemporary Slovenia to Bulgaria, and into a northern section, which coincided with the areas from the Elbe in today’s eastern Germany to the upper Volga in north­eastern Russia. In the west, the Magyar-speakers skirted the East and Carinthian Marks (future eastern Austria) of the Holy Roman Empire. This region, previously the meeting point of Slavic- and West Germanic-speakers, changed into the linguistic borderland between the latter and the Magyars. In the eastern corner of the arch of the Carpathians (future Transylvania), perhaps, the transition region of East Romance- and Magyar-speakers developed. East of the mountains, the open steppe, extending to Central Asia and Siberia, attracted various groups, mainly Turkic-speaking groups of pastoralists from the east, as it had the Huns, Avars, Bulgars, and Magyars before. Pechengs, Cumans, and, between the 1230s and 1380s, Tatars of the Golden Horde dominated this area. During the time, Romance-speakers from Transylvania and the eastern Carpathians migrated to the steppe south and east of the Carpathians, which created a more homogenous East Romancephone area extending to the Danube delta and the Dniester. This process culminated in the emergence of Moldavia and Walachia in the second half of the 14th century. As a result, the territory, populated by Magyars and East Romance-speakers, separated the Northern and Southern Slavs (Magocsi 2002: 6–15; Sedlar 1994: 3–13; Urbanczyk 2000: 136–138).