Produced by ellinora, John Campbell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE Italic text is denoted by _underscores_. A superscript is denoted by ^x or ^{xx}, for example 5^e or 2^{me}. Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the footnotes have been placed at the end of each chapter. Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book. [Illustration: (Logo of the American Geographical Society of New York)] THE FRONTIERS OF LANGUAGE AND NATIONALITY IN EUROPE BY LEON DOMINIAN [Illustration: (Colophon of the publisher)] PUBLISHED FOR THE AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1917 COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS RAHWAY, N. J. To my Alma Mater Robert College of Constantinople PREFACE This book is submitted as a study in applied geography. Its preparation grew out of a desire to trace the connection existing between linguistic areas in Europe and the subdivision of the continent into nations. The endeavor has been made to show that language exerts a strong formative influence on nationality because words express thoughts and ideals. But underlying the currents of national feeling, or of speech, is found the persistent action of the land, or geography, which like the recurrent motif of an operatic composition prevails from beginning to end of the orchestration and endows it with unity of theme. Upon these foundations, linguistic frontiers deserve recognition as the symbol of the divide between distinct sets of economic and social conditions. The attention bestowed on the Turkish area has been determined by the bearing of the Turkish situation on European international affairs and in the earnest belief that the application of geographical knowledge could provide an acceptable settlement of the Eastern Question. Never has it been realized better than at the present time that an ill-adjusted boundary is a hatching-oven for war. A scientific boundary, on the other hand, prepares the way for permanent goodwill between peoples. My effort has been directed to confine the work to a presentation of facts, as I have felt that the solution of the boundary problems involved could not be reached satisfactorily by individual opinion. Should these pages afford a working basis, or prove suggestive, in the settlement of European boundary conflicts, I shall feel compensated for the time and labor bestowed on the collection of the material herein contained.