It is with great pleasure that we announce the visit of Andriy Danylenko to the University of Leicester, and his Public Lecture 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: Ken Edwards Building, Room 528 (University of Leicester)
With a virtual component available through the link provided below.
The public lecture will include a Q&A. There will be wine and snacks available.
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. Transported 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
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)
In addition to the primary, in-person component to the event, a hybrid option is available via the following link:
Meeting ID: 355 391 988 606
Passcode: Ge9QN3gg
Thank you very much for your interest in the talk.
