Turkish languageTurkish (Türkçe , Türk dili; also Türkiye Türkçesi 'Turkish of Turkey') is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with around 80 to 90 million speakers. It is the national language of Turkey and Northern Cyprus. Significant smaller groups of Turkish speakers also exist in Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Greece, Cyprus, other parts of Europe, the Caucasus, and some parts of Central Asia, Iraq, and Syria. Cyprus has requested the European Union to add Turkish as an official language, as one of the two official languages of Cyprus.
Montenegrin language'Montenegrin' (ˌmɒntᵻˈniːɡrᵻn ; crnogorski / црногорски) is a normative variety of the Serbo-Croatian language mainly used by Montenegrins and is the official language of Montenegro. Montenegrin is based on the most widespread dialect of Serbo-Croatian, Shtokavian, more specifically on Eastern Herzegovinian, which is also the basis of Standard Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian. Montenegro's language has historically and traditionally been called either Serbian or Montenegrin.
Old Church SlavonicOld Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic (sləˈvɒnɪk,_slæˈ-) was the first Slavic literary language. Historians credit the 9th-century Byzantine missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius with standardizing the language and undertaking the task of translating the Gospels and necessary liturgical books into it as part of the Christianization of the Slavs. It is thought to have been based primarily on the dialect of the 9th-century Byzantine Slavs living in the Province of Thessalonica (in present-day Greece).
Pluricentric languageA pluricentric language or polycentric language is a language with several interacting codified standard forms, often corresponding to different countries. Many examples of such languages can be found worldwide among the most-spoken languages, including but not limited to Chinese in mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore; English in the United Kingdom, the United States, India, and elsewhere; and French in France, Canada, and elsewhere. The converse case is a monocentric language, which has only one formally standardized version.
Dialect continuumA dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varieties may not be. This is a typical occurrence with widely spread languages and language families around the world, when these languages did not spread recently.
IstriaIstria (ˈɪstriə ; Croatian and Slovene: Istra; Eîstria; Istro-Romanian, Italian and Venetian: Istria; formerly Histria in Latin and Ἱστρία in Ancient Greek) is the largest peninsula within the Adriatic Sea. The peninsula is located at the head of the Adriatic between the Gulf of Trieste and the Kvarner Gulf. It is shared by three countries: Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy, with 90% of surface area being part of Croatia. Croatia encapsulates most of the Istrian peninsula within Istria County.
DubrovnikDubrovnik (dǔbroːʋniːk), historically known as Ragusa (raˈɡuːza; see notes on naming), is a city in southern Dalmatia, Croatia, by the Adriatic Sea. It is one of the most prominent tourist destinations in the Mediterranean, a seaport and the centre of the Dubrovnik-Neretva County. Its total population is 41,562 (2021 census). In 1979, the city of Dubrovnik was added to the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites in recognition of its outstanding medieval architecture and fortified old town.
Minimal pairIn phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate that two phones represent two separate phonemes in the language. Many phonologists in the middle part of the 20th century had a strong interest in developing techniques for discovering the phonemes of unknown languages, and in some cases, they set up writing systems for the languages.
Fusional languageFusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features. For example, the Spanish verb comer ("to eat") has the first-person singular preterite tense form comí ("I ate"); the single suffix -í represents both the features of first-person singular agreement and preterite tense, instead of having a separate affix for each feature.
Serbian Cyrillic alphabetThe Serbian Cyrillic alphabet (Српска ћирилица / Srpska ćirilica, sr̩̂pskaː tɕirǐlitsa) is a variation of the Cyrillic script used to write the Serbian language, adapted in 1818 by the Serbian philologist and linguist Vuk Karadžić. It is one of the two alphabets used to write modern standard Serbian, the other being Gaj's Latin alphabet. Karadžić based his alphabet on the previous Slavonic-Serbian script, following the principle of "write as you speak and read as it is written", removing obsolete letters and letters representing iotated vowels, introducing from the Latin alphabet instead, and adding several consonant letters for sounds specific to Serbian phonology.
