Southeastern Europe, a polyethnic and multilingual area with at least 150 ethnolinguistic groups, has formed the Balkan Sprachbund and Balkan Kulturbund due to centuries-long linguistic contact, incorporation into larger empires and states, and mutual influences of Greek, Roman and Romance, Paleo-Balkan and Albanian, Slavic, Ottoman Turkish, Western European, and Russian cultures. Anthropology and linguistics aim to establish the characteristics of these unions, including their nutrition science aspects. This paper uses the ongoing international project "Minor Dialectological Atlas of the Balkan Languages" to study the general and regional phenomena of nutrition in this region and their verbal code. We discuss methods of collecting, analyzing, and presenting linguistic and anthropological information on linguistic maps. The study includes over 1000 semantic items, and maps present and generalize types of phenomena that reveal the complexity and multi-aspect nature of cultural and linguistic ties among Balkan peoples. The paper establishes both contact-induced change and idioethnic specificity of cultures and languages in the region, revealing nutrition strategies of the inhabitants, such as the cult of bread, ritual feedings, the role of honey, bread, maize and dairy products in nutrition, and the traditionally central role of small livestock products. We provide common Balkan and regional lexical terms of different origins and semantemes, such as ‘bread on St. George's Day’, ‘New Year’s bread or pie with objects for fortune-telling’, ‘ritual bread at a funeral’, ‘funeral dishes made from wheat’, ‘corn oil’, ‘corn flour’, ‘shallots’, ‘onion leaves’, ‘leeks’, ‘cream, foam on boiled milk’, etc., which are indicative of the nutrition practices in the region. The study concludes that only a comprehensive, multifaceted, and interdisciplinary analysis of the most reliable, comparable primary facts of language and culture allows for the disclosure of the general and specific regularities of nutrition strategies and practices in this polyethnic region.
