Location
University of Leicester (and via Teams)
Hosted by the University of Leicester and the DoSSE project, Professor Andriy Danylenko (Pace University, NY) will be giving a public lecture – in-person and online – on the subject of: ‘The Slavic Slaves in al-Andalus & Ifrīqīyah: A Case of Linguistic Hybridization in the Late First Millennium’.
Date: 30 April (Wednesday) 2025
Time: 16:00–17:30
Location: Room 528, Ken Edwards Building, University of Leicester
For a Teams link to attend virtually, please email Erin Thomas Dailey etd4@leicester.ac.uk.
The public lecture will include a Q&A. There will be wine and snacks available for everyone attending in-person.
Abstract
In the lecture, Dr Danylenko will offer a sociolinguistic reconstruction of the Slavic language as used by the Slavic (ṣaqlabī) slaves in al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) and Ifrīqīyah (North Africa) in the 9th through the 11th century. Transshipped from the Balkans and East-Central Europe, the ṣaqlabī slaves went through cultural and linguistic assimilation due to distant (outside the primary habitat of the Slavs) and historically short-term contact with local Arabic culture and language. Despite heavy assimilation, the ṣaqlabī slaves might retain ethnolinguistic group (tribal) identity and created a kind of linguistic hybrid, called here Slavo-Arabic. While summarizing the findings of his predecessors, the author treats Slavo-Arabic as a secretive and relexified language in the making. Some typological parallels with Judeo-Arabic and other mixed languages in the Afro-Asian Arabic-speaking world are discussed with an eye to shedding a new light on the linguistic history of Slavs in the Muslim Mediterranean ecumene and beyond
About the Speaker
Andriy Danylenko is professor of Russian and Slavic Linguistics in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures (Pace University, New York). He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative-Historical, Typological and Contrastive Linguistics from the Moscow Peoples’ Friendship University (Russian Federation). Dr. Danylenko is the author and editor of dozens of books on Slavic linguistics and philology as well many studies on a wide array of topics ranging from Indo-European, Semitic Studies to areal typology and Ukrainian linguistics. He is General Editor of the series, Studies in Slavic, Baltic, and Eastern European Languages and Cultures (Lexington Books-Rowman & Littlefield / Bloomsbury)