Proceeding from the understanding that evidentiality is not a Balkanism, as it shows no specificity in the Balkan language union (BLU) in comparison with other languages where this semantic category is expressed and has no common categorical and functional characteristics across the Balkan languages, this article considers some means of expressing evidentiality in the languages of the BLU.

In our study, we distinguish three evidentiality subcategories: renarrative, inferential (conclusive), and (ad-)mirative (dubitative).

Taking into account the typical for the Balkans linguistic contacts (especially in the situation of subordinate bilingualism), this paper considers such understudied problems as 1) the emergence of evidentiality devices in some isolated Balkan dialects developing in a bilingual situation under the influence of Bulgarian and/or Albanian (the only BLU languages where evidentiality is grammaticalized); and 2) the lack of evidentiality in Albanian dialects in Greece and Italy, as well as in Bulgarian dialects in South-Western Macedonia, Southern Thrace, and in the Strandja Mountain area. The existing explanations that this category disappeared in the Rhodope dialects under Greek influence are unconvincing.

Special attention is paid to lexical evidentiality markers analysed here using the existing parallel literary text corpora. Notably, despite the differences between the Balkan languages, they use similar or even identical lexical evidentiality markers.

The paper also addresses manipulative uses of evidential forms in modern mass media such as the use of renarrative in Bulgarian as a means to create a distancing effect or communicate distrust and irony; the use of the renarrative conditional in Romanian to indicate sources of unverified information; and the use of the Admirative in Albanian mass media in Kosovo and North Macedonia as a reportative form with an epistemic nuance of distrust.