LINGUISTIC AEEAS IN EUROPE DOMINIAN. 441 



greater. It is, in fact, sufficiently pronounced to have generally led 

 to its inclusion with Bulgarian. Travelers in the land of the Mace- 

 donian Slavs know that a knowledge of Bulgarian will obviate diffi- 

 culties due to ignorance of the country's vernaculars. Serbian, how- 

 ever, is not as readily intelligible to the natives. 



These relations have not illogically weighted the consensus of 

 authority on the Bulgarian side. The result is that compilers of 

 linguistic or ethnographic maps have generally abstained from dif- 

 ferentiating the Macedonian from the Bulgarian area.^ The im- 

 possibility for Bulgarians to regard the terms of the treaty of 

 Bucarest as final are, therefore, obvious. Extension of the Rumanian 

 boundary to the Turtukai-Black Sea line was also an encroachment 

 on soil where Bulgarian was the predominant language.^ 



In its westernmost area the delimitation of a Bulgarian linguis- 

 tic boundary is greatly • hampered by the relatively large Serbian- 

 speaking element on the north and a corresponding mass of Greeks 

 on the south. Eeliable statistics are still unavailable. The region 

 in which determination of Bulgarian or Serbian linguistic pre- 

 dominance assumes its most complicated phase is found in the 

 quadrangle constituted by Pirot-Nish-Vranja-Prisrend. Here the 

 language of the Slavic natives departs equally from the Bulgarian 

 and Serbian, between which it varies. This region, however, lies 

 north of Macedonia proper. At the same time, there appears to be 

 little room to doubt that the area of Bulgarian speech extends 

 to the zone of the eastern Albanian dialects and that it attains the 

 Gulf of Salonica. But the seafaring population of the yEgean 

 coast is largely Greek except in the sections within Bulgarian bound- 

 aries which are now destitute of Greek fishermen. 



The advance of Teutonic and Bulgarian forces in Serbia and 

 Albania during the winter of 1915-16 has resulted in a westerly 

 spread of the territory occupied by Bulgarians. Decision on the 

 permanence of this occupation will rest with the peace congress to 

 convene at the end of the present European war. 



16. THE AREA OF ALBANIAN SPEECH. 



Outside of Macedonia, a Balkan zone, in which political and lin- 

 guistic boundaries fail to coincide, existed until recently in southern 

 Albania. The frontier of this principality with Greece had been 

 extended into a region in which Greek was undoubtedly spoken by 



1 D. M. Brancoff, La Macedoine et sa population Chretienne, Plon, Paris, 1905. The 

 Serbian viewpoint is resumed by J. Cviji6 in " Etiinographie de la Macedoine," Ann. de 

 Geogr., 15, 1906, pp. 115-132, and 249-266. 



2 It is estimated tliat 1,198,000 Bulgarians are still under foreign rule in the Balkans as 

 a result of the treaty of Bucarest. Of these 286,000 live in Rumania, 315,000 in Greece, 

 and 597,000 in Serbia. Cf. R. A. Tsanoff, Jour, of Race Develop., January, 1915, p. 251. 



