Slavic Slaves in Early Medieval Andalusia and North Africa

Andriy Danylenko is Professor of Russian and Slavic Linguistics in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures (Pace University, New York), Distinguished Professor at the National University of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” (Ukraine). He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative-Historical, Typological and Contrastive Linguistics from the Moscow Peoples’ Friendship University (Russian Federation). He 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 (Bloomsbury). Prof. Danylenko is a 2026 Fulbright scholar based at the University of Warsaw (Poland).

In the lecture, Dr Danylenko offers 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, Slavic slaves went through cultural and linguistic assimilation due to distant and historically short-term contact with local Arabic culture and language. Despite heavy acculturation, the ṣaqlabī  slaves retained 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 other mixed languages in the Afro-Asian Arabic-speaking world are discussed with an eye to shedding a new light on both the linguistic and cultural history of Slavs in the Islamicate Mediterranean ecumene and beyond.

This lecture is supported by Fulbright Iceland.