Page 222 - Manj razširjeni evropski jeziki in jezikovne politike

Summary

still in use in the literary, liturgical and protocol register, which was revived
and fully empowered after many centuries, with the aid of neologisms. Eu-
ropean Yiddish was born through the process of the hybridisation of Old
High German and an admixture of Hebrew, thus a basically Germanic lan-
guage coloured with elements of Hebrew. Moreover, the monograph pro-
cures some data regarding Judeo-Spanish/Ladino on the brink of extinc-
tion in Bosnia and Herzegovina but remaining persistent in the European
part of Turkey. Today’s Latin, of Italic origin, could also be classified among
the less commonly spoken languages: despite the archaic image and the
loss of its function as a spoken language it remains, alongside Italian, the
official language of the Vatican City State, but also perpetuates its role as
a language of liturgy and science, whilst in a small circle of its utilisers it
evolves even as a language of contemporary media. Some attention has
also been dedicated to the contemporary Greek vernaculars in Southern
Italy and Corsica. Both groups of the Greek community speeches, those
in Puglia (Griko/Greko) as well as those in Calabria (Calabrian Greek), are
written in modern Latin instead of the Greek alphabet. These two micro-
languages are most probably descendants of the spoken Ancient Greek,
whereas the Greek variety in the surroundings of the little Corsican town
Cargèse is more likely derived from the Peloponnese dialect of Byzantine
Greek, i.e. medieval Greek. With regard to Turkish, a macro-language be-
longing to the Altaic family, which can certainly not be treated as a less
commonly spoken, but undoubtedly as a lesser-known language in Europe,
one can observe the following contradiction: the eu member states refuse
to grant it any official status in Cyprus despite the historical fact that the
Turks settled on the island as far back as the 16th century. In addition,
a few paragraphs of our work focus on the heritage of the Baltic language
branch, notably the extinct Old Prussian and both currently surviving lan-
guages of this group, meaning Lithuanian and Latvian. The Celtic micro-
languages Cornish and Manx/Manx Gaelic are briefly presented as two ex-
perimental examples of already extinct languages which have been in the
process of revival over the last few decades. On the other hand, we intro-
duce the reader to the past situation of both extinct varieties of the Ro-
mance language known under the name of Dalmatian, i.e. Vegliot on the
isle of Krk and Ragusan on the territory of Dubrovnik and its vicinity. The
evidence of their existence are, in particular, historical documents kept in
the archives, but also toponyms and a few sporadic semantic and morpho-
syntactic remains in current Croatian dialects along the Adriatic Coast.
Istriot, the modern stage of Vulgar Latin in the south of the Istrian

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