Language plays an important role for the identity building of nation states and smaller
linguistic communities. The authors of this volume present different aspects of the mutual
influences between linguistic identity political dominance religious denomination and the
social political and historical frameworks in which language choice or maintenance take
place. Another major issue is the expression of a specific culture as reflected in literature
and religious texts. Examples presented include Anatolia and the peripheries of Turkey such as
the Balkans Greece the Caucasus the northern Black Sea region Cyprus and Iraq.In these
regions most speakers of minority languages are bi- or multilingual while the distribution of
spoken varieties often does not coincide with political borders which cut through much older
areas of settlement or historical domains. Across the greater area the long-lasting and at
times extensive contacts of genealogically unrelated languages representing the Turkic
Indo-European Semitic and South Kartvelian families have led to considerable structural
changes and linguistic convergence. These contacts have also contributed to the formation of
characteristic regional traits in the cultures of the different peoples of these regions.
