Go Back

Jouko Lindstedt

Jouko Sakari Lindstedt
Born July 15, 1955, Helsinki

Bachelor of Arts 1981, Licentiate of Philosophy 1983 and Doctor of Philosophy 1985 (Slavonic Philology), University of Helsinki

Professor of Slavonic Philology 1986-, University of Helsinki
Acting Professor of Slavonic Philology 1985, University of Helsinki

Publications, research projects and other academic activities

Research interests: development of Bulgarian and Macedonian as Balkan languages; origins, spontaneous change and nativisation of Esperanto as a language in contact; language policy in the Balkans and the European Union; Old Church Slavonic and early Slavonic studies; South Slavonic Philology; tense, aspect and evidentiality.

Member of the Helsinki Area & Language Studies group, promoting research on linguistic diversity and language ecology and fieldwork on minority-language speech communities.

Photo: Valokuvaamo Helläkoski, Lahti
Written by Jouko Lindstedt and Riitta-Ilona Hurmerinta (ed.)
Translated by John Calton

The lesser-studied coherence of the Balkans

When speaking about the Balkans, the first thing that comes to mind for anyone at all familiar with its history and politics are bitter disputes between small nation states, inflamed relations between ethnic groups and the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia. The area has been called anything from “the Orient of Europe” to “the powderkeg of Europe”. In the popular imagination the area is hopelessly fragmented–Balkanised. But the linguist has a very different understanding.

Despite there being a dozen or more languages spoken there, the Balkan languages are in linguistics the best known example of a linguistic area, or Sprachbund, in other words an area where, over the course of centuries, the languages have influenced each other to the extent that even their grammatical structures have become similar.

The common core of the Balkan languages isn’t immediately apparent. Each language has kept its own distinct vocabulary, so that a speaker of one Balkan language can’t necessarily make out what the speaker of another Balkan language is saying. But each language builds sentences more or less according to the same patterns, employs similar grammatical categories and draws on the same pool of wisdom for its sayings and figures of speech.

Photo: Jouko Lindstedt.​
Photo: Jouko Lindstedt.​

This, for professor Jouko Lindstedt, is the most exciting aspect of research into the Balkan languages. The languages serve to demonstrate the language diversity and peaceful coexistence of the linguistically distinct peoples in the Balkans – in particular in the multinational Ottoman empire, so often the preserve of military historians.

Further reading:

Go Back