Balkans
42.0000°N 22.0000°E · Q23522
2 English words in this atlas trace back to Balkans. It sits in .
The word for fragmentation goes back to a Turkish word for a wooded mountain.
Balkan is Turkish for a chain of wooded mountains, applied first to the range crossing Bulgaria and then to the whole peninsula. The Oxford English Dictionary records balkanization from 1914, and the word spread during the Versailles negotiations of 1919. The mountain range that started it is only about 560 kilometers long.
The word was coined by outsiders about a peninsula they had just finished carving up.
The Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913 and the settlements that followed the First World War left southeastern Europe split into small rival states, and Western commentators turned the region's name into a verb around 1920. Arnold Toynbee credited the coinage to German socialists describing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. English now applies it to anything that fragments, from computer networks to school districts.