The goal of the article is to explore the properties of bilingual and
multilingual situations with balanced, or non-polyglossic, relationships between languages in the modern Balkans. A comparison with non-balanced, or polyglossic, settings aims at determining the factors that support balanced bilingualism in one Balkan community and result in different dominance configurations in the others.
The main case that is scrutinized is the situation of “balanced language contact”
in a small-scale village community of Velja Gorana (Montenegro). Its analysis is based on field observations made in the bilingual families of Velja Gorana in 2013 to 2015. Besides, we overview a range of Balkan bilingual and multilingual communities, based on the existing literature, and analyse the patterns of (socio)linguistic dominance of the languages spoken in each community.