1 LANGUAGE CONTACT IN THE BYZANTINE WORLD: FACTS AND IDEOLOGIES THEODORE MARKOPOULOS 1. INTRODUCTION * The study of the history of a language constitutes beyond doubt the most obvious meeting point between political ideology and linguistic practice. As is well-known, most modern Western states were built as nation-states, where a clear majority of the population (the ‘nation’) speaks (or is considered to speak) one and the same language (the ‘national’ language). The close relationship between language and identity goes back at least to the late Middle Ages-early Modern period (cf. BURKE 2004, pp. 160-161), but has been further solidified in the last three centuries (eighteenth-twentieth century), when language played a major role in the formation of the modern nation- states. As a result, the telling of the ‘history’ of a language might have obvious and far-reaching consequences for the history of the nation it refers to, with clear political side-effects. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the first modern attempts (eighteenth- mid-twentieth century) to portray the history of specific languages had political agendas, similarly to the search for the origin of various people and their language(s) (on the inter-relationship between political and cultural ideological premises and the development of Indo-European linguistics, cf. ARVIDSSON 2006, among many others). As can be expected, the history of Greek, the focus of this paper, is no exception to this rule. Two major factors have further strengthened the bond between politics and the history in this case: the turbulent history of the Balkans and the millennia-long diglossic situation in Greece. With regard to the former, it should be noted that ever since its foundation (1830) and till the Second World War, the * I am grateful to Peter Mackridge for his thorough reading of an earlier draft of this paper as well as for his valuable comments.