Syllabic Patterns in South-Eastern Europe

Whereas in most of the world's languages syllable patterns are built according to the principles of sonority theory (they have the one-peak syllable pattern), in some Balkan languages, there occur deviations from the one-peak syllable pattern of a systemic nature. They mainly concern the distribution of nasal consonants and appear either in the onset (Albanian) or coda (Romanian). Such deviations occur also in the northern Slavic languages. At the very south of Europe the open syllable pattern occurs.