Summary
One of the more revealing statements concerning the linguistic geography of southeastern Europe appears in Charles Sablier’s 1777 work, Essai sur les langues en général, sur la langue françoise en particulier, et sa progression depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à présent. In the passage shown in the original document, Sablier writes: “L’Esclavon se parle au nord du Danube” — “Slavonic is spoken north of the Danube.” Immediately afterward, he adds: “La langue Epiroise s’est conservée dans l’Epire ou Albanie” — “The Epirote language has been preserved in Epirus or Albania.” The book was published in Paris by Monory in 1777.
Taken in isolation, this sentence is simply a description of eighteenth-century linguistic geography. But placed within the longer history of the Balkans, it becomes considerably more significant. It reflects the enormous expansion of the Slavic linguistic world across territories that, in antiquity, had belonged to a very different Balkan ethnic and linguistic landscape.
The central question is therefore not whether Sablier was claiming that the ancient Dardanians themselves lived north of the Danube. He was not. Rather, his statement provides a later snapshot of a linguistic transformation that had taken place over many centuries: the spread of Slavic speech across the Danubian region and deep into the former territories of Illyrian, Dardanian and other Paleo-Balkan populations.
The terminology used by eighteenth-century European scholars makes this even more interesting. The Encyclopédie contains an entry explicitly entitled “Illyrien ou Esclavon” — “Illyrian or Slavonic.” It describes “Illyrian or Slavonic” as being spoken across a vast territory, including Dalmatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Moravia, Bohemia, Poland, Croatia and other regions.
This does not mean that the editors believed modern Slavic languages were literally the same languages spoken by the ancient Illyrians. Rather, it demonstrates how the old geographical and ethnographic name “Illyrian” continued to be attached to the Slavic linguistic world of the Balkans. In other words, the terminology itself preserves an important historical memory: territories once associated with ancient Illyria had become predominantly Slavic-speaking, while the older name continued to circulate in European scholarship.
This transformation becomes especially important when considering Dardania. The Dardanians were an ancient Balkan population whose territory was centered in the region of present-day Kosovo and adjoining areas. Their historical presence in the central Balkans is well documented, and Dardania became a defined region under Roman administration. The medieval linguistic landscape of this territory, however, was profoundly different from that of antiquity.
The Slavic North of the Danube and the Slavicization of the Central Balkans
Beginning in late antiquity and especially during the sixth and seventh centuries, Slavic-speaking populations expanded south of the Danube. The movement was not simply a single military invasion followed by the immediate replacement of the existing inhabitants. The archaeological and historical evidence points toward a prolonged process involving migration, settlement, warfare, political collapse, assimilation and interaction between incoming Slavic communities and the populations already living in the Balkans.
Some Slavic groups entered territories that had previously belonged to the Roman provinces of Illyricum, Moesia and Dardania, establishing settlements and eventually creating permanent Slavic-speaking communities. Historical reconstructions place Slavic settlement along the Morava and Vardar corridors and into territories that had formerly constituted Dardania and other Balkan provinces.
This is where the statement “Slavonic is spoken north of the Danube” becomes relevant. The Danube was not the southern limit of the Slavic world. It was one of the principal gateways through which Slavic-speaking populations entered southeastern Europe. By the medieval period, Slavic languages had become established far south of the river, including in territories that had previously belonged to the Dardanian and wider Illyrian world.
The transformation was linguistic as much as demographic. An indigenous population did not necessarily have to disappear in order for its language to disappear. Populations could remain in their ancestral territories while adopting the language of politically or socially dominant groups. This is particularly important in the case of the Balkans, where successive layers of population and political authority were superimposed upon one another.
The process can therefore be understood as a gradual linguistic layering: an ancient Paleo-Balkan population was incorporated into the Roman world; the Roman world was transformed by the collapse of imperial authority; Slavic-speaking communities entered and settled throughout the region; and, over the following centuries, many of the surviving populations adopted Slavic languages and Slavic cultural forms.
This is what makes the later evidence from Dardania so important. Medieval documents frequently present the region through Slavic terminology, names and administrative structures. Yet the appearance of a Slavic name does not necessarily mean that the population bearing it had recently arrived from a Slavic homeland. A population can adopt the language and naming conventions of an administrative power without being completely replaced demographically.
The evidence concerning Albanian and Slavic contact is particularly relevant here. Xhelal Ylli notes that the geographical proximity of Albanian- and Slavic-speaking populations over many centuries produced extensive linguistic contact. This contact intensified during the medieval expansion of the Bulgarian and Serbian states and left traces not only in vocabulary and grammar but also in toponymy.
The toponymic evidence is especially revealing. Research by Iljaz Rexha on medieval Albanian settlements in Kosovo, Nish and Shtip argues that numerous earlier Albanian or proto-Albanian place-names were subsequently rendered through Slavic forms, including through translation, adaptation and the addition of Slavic suffixes.
His chronology is particularly important: he identifies an earlier Slavic layer associated with the period of medieval Bulgarian rule, followed by a stronger Slavic layer during the period of medieval Serbian administration.
This distinction allows us to separate two related but different processes: Slavicization and Serbianization.
Slavicization was the broader process by which populations and territories became linguistically and culturally Slavic. It preceded the full expansion of the medieval Serbian state into many parts of the central Balkans. Serbianization was a later and more specific process associated with the political, ecclesiastical and administrative expansion of medieval Serbia.
Consequently, it would be historically inaccurate to attribute every Slavic feature of medieval Dardania directly to Serbia. Some Slavic linguistic influence in the region was already present during earlier periods of Bulgarian rule.
Nevertheless, Serbian rule subsequently intensified this process. As Serbian political and ecclesiastical institutions expanded into Kosovo and neighboring territories, Slavic administrative terminology, personal names and place-names became increasingly prominent. Older local names could be translated, modified or replaced by Slavic forms. Over time, the new forms could become the standard written names, concealing the linguistic history of the older population.
This is an important distinction when reading medieval records. A Serbian or Slavic place-name does not automatically prove that the settlement was originally founded by Serbs, nor does a Slavic personal name necessarily demonstrate that its bearer was ethnically Serbian. Names belong to languages and administrative systems as much as they belong to ethnic identities.
The same phenomenon can be observed elsewhere in Europe. When a conquering or dominant population introduces its own administrative language, older names are frequently translated or reshaped. Once this happens, later generations can easily assume that the later linguistic form represents the original identity of the settlement. In the Balkans, this process was particularly extensive because several successive political and linguistic systems occupied the same geographical territory.
This helps explain why the medieval linguistic history of Dardania cannot simply be read backward from the later Serbian-speaking landscape. The existence of a predominantly Slavic or Serbian toponymy in later centuries tells us what language was dominant when those documents were produced. It does not, by itself, tell us that the same linguistic situation existed in antiquity.
The survival of Albanian is especially important in this context. Sablier himself distinguishes the Slavic linguistic sphere from what he calls the preserved “Epirote” language in Epirus or Albania. By the eighteenth century, Albanian had survived as a distinct Balkan language despite centuries of Roman, Byzantine, Slavic, Bulgarian, Serbian and Ottoman political domination.
That survival provides an important reminder that linguistic change does not necessarily correspond to complete population replacement. If Slavicization had always meant the physical disappearance of earlier Balkan populations, the survival of Albanian would be much more difficult to explain. Instead, the historical record is compatible with a more complex process in which some communities changed language while others preserved older linguistic traditions.
The same framework can be applied to the question of the Dardanians and the wider Illyrian population. The precise linguistic relationship between ancient Dardanian, Illyrian and Albanian remains debated because the ancient languages are poorly documented. It would therefore be too strong to claim that modern Albanian has been conclusively proven to be simply “the language of the Dardanians.”
What can be said is that Dardania formed part of the pre-Slavic population landscape of the central Balkans and that the region subsequently underwent extensive Slavic linguistic transformation. The survival of Albanian in and around the former Dardanian sphere is therefore an important part of the broader question of continuity and language shift.
Moravia provides another piece of the same geographical puzzle. By the ninth century, Great Moravia had become a major Slavic political formation in the central Danube region. This demonstrates how far the Slavic-speaking world had developed around the Danube before the medieval Serbian state reached its later territorial extent. The Slavic world was not a single nation but a broad linguistic and cultural sphere encompassing different political communities — Moravians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Croats and others.
The later Serbianization of parts of Dardania must therefore be understood as one stage within a much larger Slavic expansion, not as the beginning of Slavic influence in the region.
Seen in this wider context, Sablier’s eighteenth-century statement acquires a deeper significance. “Slavonic is spoken north of the Danube” describes only one part of a much larger linguistic geography. By Sablier’s time, Slavic languages stretched across a vast area of Central and Eastern Europe and deep into the Balkans. Yet several centuries earlier, many of these territories had belonged to populations and cultures that were not Slavic.
The transformation from the ancient Balkan world to the medieval Slavic world was therefore not instantaneous. It was a process of settlement, assimilation and linguistic replacement extending over centuries. In some regions, Slavic communities became dominant. In others, indigenous populations adopted Slavic languages. Elsewhere, older languages survived. In Dardania and neighboring regions, the process was subsequently reinforced by Bulgarian and then Serbian political and ecclesiastical institutions.
The result was that later Serbian and Slavic terminology came to dominate the written historical record of territories whose earlier inhabitants belonged to a substantially different linguistic world.
This is why the 1777 testimony should be read not as an isolated statement but as a surviving piece of a much larger historical puzzle. Sablier’s “Slavonic north of the Danube” belongs to a linguistic landscape created by centuries of Slavic expansion. The Encyclopédie‘s remarkable expression “Illyrian or Slavonic” reveals how, by the eighteenth century, the old name of Illyria could itself be attached to a Slavic linguistic world. And the medieval evidence from Dardania shows how Slavic and eventually Serbian linguistic forms were superimposed upon an older Balkan landscape.
The historical picture that emerges is therefore one of transformation rather than simple replacement. The Slavicization of the Balkans changed the languages, names and political identities of populations that had lived there before the Slavic migrations.
In Dardania, this process was followed by centuries of Bulgarian and Serbian political influence, producing an increasingly Slavic and eventually strongly Serbian administrative and toponymic landscape. Yet the persistence of older linguistic elements, together with the survival and development of Albanian, indicates that the older populations of the region cannot simply be assumed to have disappeared.
In that sense, the later Serbian-speaking landscape should not be projected backward into antiquity. It was the product of a historical process. The names changed, the administrative languages changed, political identities changed, and populations changed their languages. What remained beneath these successive layers was a much older Balkan demographic and cultural history — one that cannot be recovered simply by reading the medieval Slavic record at face value.
References
Sablier, Charles. Essai sur les langues en général, sur la langue françoise en particulier, et sa progression depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à présent. Paris: Monory, 1777.
“Illyrien ou Esclavon.” Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. Eighteenth-century edition. ARTFL, University of Chicago.
Petrović, Vladimir P. “Pre-Roman and Roman Dardania: Historical and Geographical Considerations.” Balcanica 37 (2006): 7–23.
Ylli, Xhelal. “Albanian and Slavic Contact.” Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics Online. Brill.
Rexha, Iljaz. “Slavisation of Medieval Albanian Onomastics in the Area of Kosova, Nish and Shtip.” Kosova, no. 43.
Koledarov, Peter. “Regional Names in the Central and Eastern Parts of the Balkan Peninsula.”
