Linguistic areas are a linguistic phenomenon present on all continents (except Antarctica). This phenomenon most often encompass the morphosyntactic level and is the result of a long coexistence between speakers of different languages, in circumstances where there is no language in a particular area that could be described as a lingua franca. The linguistic area that has been research the longest is the Balkan language area, which consists of languages from different groups of Indo-European languages: Slavic, Albanian, Romance, Greek, Indo-Iranian as well as Turkish, which is a representative of the Turkic language family. The question of the origin of balkanisms remains open and the establishment of a relative chronology plays a key role in finding the answer to this question. It could help to not only find the origin of each balkanism individually, but also to explore the path of diffusion of balkanisms from one language to another. This master's thesis focuses on Macedonian, Bulgarian and Albanian, the three most Balkanised languages, and thoroughly presents six balkanisms: the postpositive definite article, the genitive-dative merger, the reduplication of direct and indirect objects, the loss of infinitive, the formation of the future tense with the auxiliary verb to want and the formation of the past tense with the auxiliary verb to have. These balkanisms are analyzed firstly on a synchronous level in standard languages, in the attempt to establish their relative chronology in aforementioned languages.
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