Sussex R., Cubberley P. The Slavic Languages

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Dialects

10.1 Overview

After national languages, the most intensively studied area of Slavic sociolinguis-

tics is dialectology. Investigations into the dialectology of the major Slavic lan-

guages were begun over a century ago, and all the modern Slavic languages are now

provided with dialect descriptions, sometimes based on extensive surveys. The

material gathered has concentrated on variation in phonetics, morphology and

vocabulary. Work on dialectology has tended to be biased toward the national

languages, so that dialects have usually been seen as regional variants of individual

languages, as dialect clusters related centripetally to national standard variants,

rather than as part of a total continuous trans-national dialect map of Slavic.

The Slavic languages in Europe – in other words, excluding non-European

Russia – show the densely packed dialect map familiar in European languages.

After the settlement of the Slavs in their present homelands, which was substan-

tially completed by about the sixth century

AD, the settled, agricultural lifestyle of

the Slavs tended to discourage geographical mobility. The effects of military and

cultural activity and dominance were felt more by the urban classes than by the

rural population. It was only in the twentieth century that rural populations began

to achieve significant geographical mobility. The two World Wars, and the after-

math of the Russian Revolution, played an important role in this social change,

both directly and indirectly, as whole areas of the rural population in the USSR

perished or were relocated. A second important factor has been the expansion of

Russia into Asia from the eighteenth century, and the settlement and development

of the new lands. Russian has come into contact with new languages, ethnic groups

and contexts, resulting in the emergence of some local variations like Siberian

Russian. Such recent regional variants, however, differ most obviously in lexis,

and have had little effect on the standard language.

A more profound influence on the Slavic dialect map has been the social and

economic changes brought about by the 1917 Revolution. Increased social mobility

499

has broken down the traditional labourer–small farmer composition of the rural

areas, making it possible for people whose families had hitherto remained geograph-

ically and socially immobile to achieve both social and geographical movement.

The economic changes of the Revolution – apart from virtually wiping out certain

social levels of the intelligentsia and rural landowners – also accelerated existing

trends of migration from the country to the towns, and the disintegration of the

traditional Slavic extended family, together with the social and linguistic stability

and rigidity which it represented (Friedrich, 1966, 1972). Policy in the Soviet

Union, especially during the Stalin years, was also directed expressly toward the

dilution of regionalism and local nationalism by the planned relocation of indivi-

duals, families and even whole populations. The net effect of such upheavals in the

USSR was to promote both Great Russian nationalism and the culture of standard

Russian – since there was less motivation to learn a new local language or variant in

a new environment, when the economic incentives are in favor of the national

standard. There has also been the effect of universal education and the mass media,

particularly film, radio and television. Military service also brought young males

into contact with the national standard in some form, on an educational as well as a

social and professional level.

Since 1917 an important factor has been the increasingly less permeable nature of

Slavic geopolitical boundaries. Neighboring dialects communicated more freely

across national boundaries until the twentieth century. But the political and ideo-

logical necessities of preserving the Revolution, and the desire of the early Soviet

governments to insulate their populations from outside influence, meant that it

became more difficult for Slavs to communicate easily with adjacent dialects across

the new national boundaries. This meant a lessening of dialectal interchange across

political borders, for instance between Ukrainian and Belarusian in the east, on the

one hand, and Polish and Slovak in the west. And after 1945–1948, when the

Communist take-overs in Eastern Europe were finally complete, even borders like

that between Poland and Czechoslovakia were more strictly controlled than before.

Similarly, the former internal Yugoslav borders between Slovenia and Croatia,

Serbia and Croatia, and Serbia and Macedonia are now national borders. Such

factors, together with the strong emphasis on the national language and the promo-

tion of Russian as a supra-national language in the Soviet Union, have served to

alter the patterns of dialectal interaction, and the relation of the dialects to each

other and to the national language: regional variants are increasingly oriented

toward the national standard language of their political–geographical area.

Overall, Slavic dialects have suffered a certain decline and dilution over the last

fifty years. The constant trend, irrespective of ideology, has been in the direction of

convergence on the national standard language. The younger generation of today is

500 10. Dialects

more aware of the national language, and less loyal to local variants, than their

parents. In spite of strong regional loyalties which have their roots in customs and

folklore as well as in language and geography, there is evidence of a decline in the

vitality, local prestige and general viability of many smaller local variants. Revivals

of regional folklore, which is generally well maintained through most of the native

Slavic-speaking areas, have not achieved a revival of local language styles to the

same extent. And dialect maintenance has been hindered by the fact that there must

by now be few speakers of Slavic languages who are monolingual dialectal speak-

ers. Universal education and the high level of literacy in the Slavic lands mean that

almost all speakers are now diglossic, with strong exposure to the national standard

through education and the media. While dialects are generally conservative, in the

case of Sorbian, Czech and Slovenian the heightened conservatism of the national

language has actually increased the distance between the dialects and the national

standard (2.2.5, 2.4.2, 2.4.5).

We have selected features which illustrate each major dialect, together with the

links between dialects and neighbouring dialects, and between dialects and neigh-

bouring standard languages. We shall concentrate on general phenomena allowing

comparison across dialects, rather than on atypical local features, whatever their

inherent interest. We treat the dialects from two perspectives: from within the

context of each national language, following our conventional ordering from

west to east, and from north to south; and across geopolitical language borders,

in order to preserve as far as possible the continuity of the dialect chains. This will

lead to some redundancy, but also to a better understanding of the chains

themselves.

Using the national languages as a point of reference, however, can create

difficulties. The national languages are often not based squarely on the dialect of

the area where the capital is now located, but have been constructed out of dialectal

elements from various parts of the nation. The establishment of a capital and the

siting of the national language in it has a centripetal effect, selectively drawing

elements from different parts of the country into a culturally cohesive linguistic

whole. Rather than working solely from the national languages to the dialects,

therefore, we need also to consider the dialects in their own right if we are to achieve

a clear view of the nature and extent of Slavic dialects. Some dialects, sometimes for

historical, cultural or other reasons, exhibit similarities with dialects in other areas

which are not related by genetic or areal contiguity: some North Russian dialects,

for instance, have post-posed articles like those of Bulgarian and Macedonian. The

Slavic dialect map is not always linear, and it is not always continuous.

The majority of the features which we shall select for the description and

determination of the Slavic dialects are phonological and morphological, following

10.1 Overview 501

the central trends of Slavic dialect research over the last century. The list of features

is representative rather than comprehensive, and is designed to provide a broad-

scale picture of the Slavic dialects.

Following the discussion, the main dialectal features of each language are

summarized in a table, with the standard language forms listed in the left-hand

column for comparison. ‘‘CS-’’ designates the contemporary standard form of each

language. The final ‘Summary’ section (10.5) offers a diagrammatic view of the

connections across the whole area (figure 10.1, p. 542).

10.2 Dialects of South Slavic

South Slavic has been separated from East and West Slavic by non-Slavs

(Hungarians, Austrians, Romanians) for a thousand years. As a result, we lack

the gradual dialectal transitions to East and West Slavic, although there are some

significant similarities between dialects of Slovenian and Croatian, the northern-

most South Slavic languages, and Slovak, the southernmost of the West Slavic

languages, especially in Central Slovak dialects. Within the South Slavic group,

however, there is a rich and continuous dialectal chain leading from Slovenian in

the north-west to Macedonian and Bulgarian in the south-east. Comprehensibility

between dialects is strongly related to geographical and topographical distance.

Reasonable levels of comprehension can be achieved between Slovenian and

Croatian, and good levels between Croatian and Serbian, and Macedonian and

Bulgarian. However, the complexity and diversity of Slovenian dialects sets them

somewhat apart, even within Slovenia. This situation contrasts with the higher level

of commonality between Bulgarian and Macedonian. The Serbian Torlak dialects

serve as a transition between Serbian, on the one hand, and Bulgarian and

Macedonian, on the other.

10.2.1 Dialects of Slovenian

Slovenia borders on Italy to the west, Austria to the north, Hungary to the east, and

Croatia to the east and south. The Slovenian-speaking area overlaps with Italian

around the city of Trieste, and there are substantial numbers of Slovenian speakers in

south-eastern Austria. There are also areas where Slovenian and Croatian overlap.

Slovenian, as a result of its mountainous terrain and difficult communications,

has the densest dialect map of all the Slavic languages, and is notorious for the

difficulties of inter-comprehension posed by some of the dialects. Some dialect-

ologists of Slovenian have estimated that there are fifty dialects (Logar and Rigler,

502 10. Dialects

1986). Sławski (1962) has nine, Priestly (1993) eight and Lencek (1982) seven.

Particularly important are Carinthia (Sln Koros

ko, Ger Ka

rnten) (abbreviated as

Koros

) in the north and north-west; the Littoral (Sln Primorsko) dialects (Prim)on

the Adriatic; the Rovte (Sln Rovtarsko) dialects (Rovt) between the Littoral and

Upper Carniola (Sln Gorenjsko)(Gor), with Inner Carniola (Sln Notranjsko)(Notr)

to its south, bordering on Croatian (and the Adriatic); the two key central dialects

of Upper and Lower Carniola (Sln Dolenjsko)(Dol); the Styrian (Sln S

tajersko)

dialects (S

taj) to the east of Carniola; and the Pannonian (Sln Panonsko) dialects

(Pan) to the east of Styrian, reaching into Hungary.

Although standard Slovenian is based on the Carniolan dialects around the area

of the capital Ljubljana, it was designed to reflect models of the Slovenian literary

language of the seventeenth century (2.2.5). For these reasons, there is a significant

gap between modern written and spoken Slovenian. In addition, migration from

rural to urban centres has created mixed dialect models, especially in Ljubljana,

which is situated in the south of the Upper Carniola area and adjacent to Lower

Carniola. Apart from the suggestive but restricted set of parallelisms with Central

Slovak dialects (10.4.4), the dialect allegiances all run south and east from Slovenia,

anchoring it firmly in South Slavic.

The only adjacent Slavic language area to Slovenian is Croatian to the east and

south. The most important transitional dialects to Croatian are those of Notranjsko,

tajersko and Panonsko. Although geographically contiguous, many of these dia-

lects remained remarkably stable until 1945 (Lencek, 1982: ch. 4), when modern

communications and media, as well as geographical mobility and the migration of

rural populations to urban areas, began to blur distinctions which had held fairly

stable for centuries, thanks in part to the mountainous nature of much of the Balkans.

Lencek (1982) identifies fourteen features, based on the modern reflexes of

various aspects of Proto-Slavic phonology, as a means of defining the modern

dialect areas. We shall make eclectic use of these, together with some morpho-

logical criteria, in the analysis below.

10.2.1.1 Phonology

Standard Slovenian has two variants: a tonal variant (3.5.3), though tone is less

well maintained than in B/C/S; and a non-tonal variant, where stress and length are

the distinctive phonological features (Lencek, 1982: 163–166; Priestly 1993:

390–394). Tone and length are maintained in the conservative central dialects on

a north–south axis (Koros

, Gor, Dol). Stress is the only prosodic phonemic feature

in the other dialects.

Three other features are considered criterial in classifying Slovenian dialects: the

modern reflexes of the nasals / e˛ o˛ /(pe

t ‘five’, zo

b ‘tooth’), of jat

/(le

p ‘fine’), and

10.2 South Slavic 503

of the jers ( pe

s ‘dog’, da

n ‘day’, se

n ‘sleep’). The nasals yield low [O], and jat

yields

[e], in the north-western dialects of Koros

ko and Primorsko. Elsewhere we find the

higher vowel articulation of [e o] for the nasals and [e] for jat

. On the other hand,

the jers when lengthened yield /e/ in the north and east (in Koros

taj and Pan),

and /a/ elsewhere (as in Croatian).

Less systematic are features like the variation in the number of vowel phonemes,

diphthongization of vowels, and the degree and nature of vowel reduction in

unstressed or tonally non-prominent syllables. Some nasal vowels are retained

in parts of Koros

ko. Some northern dialects also spirantize /g/ to [ ˜] or [h],

change velarized /l/ to [w], and maintain the Proto-Slavic sequences /tl/ and /dl/,

as in West Slavic (CS-Sln krı

lo ‘wing’: Koros

kridwo; CS-Sln pa

la ‘fall’ [PartFem]:

Gor padwa).

10.2.1.2 Morphology

Slovenian dialects show broad evidence of morphological simplification, with the

partial (and in one dialect the total [Stankiewicz, 1965] ) absorption of the neuter

gender into the masculine and the feminine, and the decline of the dual number

and the supine. Standard Slovenian maintains these categories, in increasing

distance from the dialects, by conscious conservatism and language management

and legislation.

In the summary of features in table 10.1 we omit the Rovtarsko dialects, which

are a transition between the Primorsko and Carniolan dialects.

10.2.2 Dialects of B/C/S

The total area of Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian has common borders with

Slovenia in the north, Hungary in the north-east, Bulgaria in the east, FYR

Macedonia in the south and Albania in the south-west. This rich and continuous

dialect area has two focal points in terms of standards: Zagreb for Croatian; and

Belgrade for Serbian. The Bosnian standard is gradually emerging as a distinct

third variant. Although Belgrade (B/C/S Beo

grad), the former national Yugoslav

capital, is situated in the area of the Serbian variant, it shows the expected dialect

mixture of modern capital cities.

The concept of ‘‘dialect’’ is more closely involved with the concept of ‘‘national

language’’ in B/C/S than in any other Slavic language. We describe in 2.2.4 the

process by which an East Hercegovinian dialect of Serbian was accepted as a

national language in the nineteenth century. Serbo-Croatian was the only modern

Slavic language which had two standard variants, unless one accepts that Upper

504 10. Dialects

and Lower Sorbian are two variants of a single language (10.4.1, 11.3.3). These two

standard variants of Serbo-Croatian not only had historical dialectal roots, but

also had a de iure status in the constitution and the language policies of Yugoslavia.

For this reason the boundary between ‘‘standard’’, ‘‘dialect’’ and ‘‘variant’’ was

particularly complex in Serbo-Croatian. In this book we have consistently treated

B/C/S as a language on the grounds that the major variants are still formally and

functionally close enough to constitute a single entity. This approach, however,

does not touch the political or ethnic issues of the variants – which are becoming

three as Bosnia asserts its own independence and linguistic credentials. For the

purposes of dialectology, however, the difference is less crucial: we are dealing with

variants within geographical space.

The underlying dialect structure of the B/C/S language area conventionally

involves three groups, named after the word for ‘what’. Moving from north to

south, the Kajkavian (kaj ‘what’) dialects (Kajk) are spoken around Zagreb and up

Table 10.1. Dialects of Slovenian

NW to SE CS-Sln Koros

Prim Notr Gor þ Dol S

taj þ Pan

Phonology

Vowels

PSl { a/

eaaa e

PSl y a/

eaaa e

PSl e˛ e ee¼ CS ¼ CS ¼ CS

PSl o˛ o/OO O oo o

PSl e

e/ee eee e

phonemic stress þ /  þ þ  þ

phonemic pitch þ / þ   þ 

phonemic length þþþ 

Consonants

PSl g g ˜˜¼ CS ¼ CS ¼ CS

PSl l lww¼ CS Gor: w ¼ CS

PSl tl, dl l l tl dl ¼ CS ¼ CS ¼ CS

Morphology

Neuter lost – ¼ CS ¼ CS ¼ CS Gor: þ¼CS

NomSgNeut Adj o ¼ CS ¼ CS ¼ CS Dol: e ¼ CS

Inf in -ti/-t ti t ¼ CS ¼ CS ¼ CS ¼ CS

Notes:

The broad IPA values correspond to written Slovenian as follows (tonal/non-tonal systems):

[e] ¼ ‘e

’[e

] = ‘e (or e˛)/e

-e

’ [o] ¼ ‘o

’[O] ¼ ‘o (or o˛)/o

-o

’

The S

tajersko, Dolenjsko and Panonsko dialects in particular form a transition to the kaj

dialects of Croatian (10.2.2). (See further details in figure 10.1.)

10.2 South Slavic 505

to the Slovenian border, and form a transition from Croatian to Slovenian. The

akavian dialects (c

a ‘what’) (C

ak) are spoken in an area centered on Northern

Dalmatia and several islands in the Adriatic. The core of the modern literary

languages, and the major dialect area, is S

tokavian (s

to ‘what’) (S

tok), which covers

the rest of the area where B/C/S is spoken.

Within the C

akavian and S

tokavian dialect areas there is a further sub-division

based on the modern reflexes of Proto-Slavic /e

/ (Kajk, like Slovenian, shows /e/ from

/). ‘‘Ikavian’’ (Ik), with /i/ from /e

/, is spoken in Dalmatia and the west of Bosnia

and Hercegovina, but is now no longer used as a written language. In the east and

south are the ‘‘ekavian’’ (Ek) dialects (/e

/ > /e/), covering Serbia and the Vojvodina, as

well as modern literary Serbian. The ‘‘jekavian’’ (Jek) dialects, with /je/ as a short and

/ije/ as a long reflex of /e

/, are found in Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro, and were

also the variant found in older Serbian literature and in the work of Vuk Karadzˇ ic

(2.2.4), who promoted them as the basis for Serbo-Croatian. Modern B/C/S is

regularly written in ekavian in Cyrillic, and in jekavian in Roman. However, linguists

most often use the ekavian version in Roman, and this is the convention used in this

book. We discuss the ikavian–ekavian–jekavian phenomenon in 2.2.4 and 3.3.2.1.

Mutual comprehensibility is high except when north-western speakers try to

communicate with south-eastern speakers. Communication with Slovenian is

easiest for speakers of Kajkavian dialects of Croatian in the north, and with

Bulgarian and Macedonian for speakers of the fourth group of so-called Torlak

(mainly Prizren-Timok) dialects (B/C/S torlac

ki)(Torlak), in the south-east of

Serbia, which show the most transitional ‘‘Balkan’’ features to Bulgarian and

Macedonian, as well as stronger Turkish influence.

10.2.2.1 Phonology

Leaving aside the reflexes of /e

/, which have more to do with the definition of the

standard variants than with dialects (2.2.4, 3.2.1.3), the three main dialect areas of

B/C/S, plus the Torlak dialects, show a wide range of features:

Vowels



jers (da

n ‘day’,sa%n ‘sleep’): Kajk has /e/, like the eastern Slovenian

dialects (10.2.1), and some Torlak dialects have [

], like Bulgarian.



nasals (zu

b ‘tooth’): Kajk has /o/ from the back nasal, like Slovenian.

Consonants



tj, dj (sve

a, ‘candle’, me

dja ‘border’): Kajk has /c

/ from tj, like

Slovenian, and from dj it has either /j/, like Slovenian, or /dzˇ /; some

akavian dialects have palatal stop /t’/.

506 10. Dialects



final /l/ (da%o ‘give’ [PastMasc] ): Kajk retains /l/ in syllable-final posi-

tion (unlike any adjacent dialect group), as do some Torlak dialects

(like Bulgarian and Macedonian).



devoicing (su

d ‘court’): Kajk devoices final obstruents, like Slovenian.

Suprasegmental features C

ak preserves the neo-acute pitch (3.2.4.3), and did

not undergo the stress retraction which happened throughout the S

tokavian

territory (with the exception of some areas in the south). Slavonia in the north-

west has a three-tone system similar to that of C

ak and Slovenian, with a tonal

opposition only on long syllables. Many areas have a quantity opposition only

on stressed vowels (Vojvodina in the north-east and Smederevo and Zeta in

the south).

10.2.2.2 Morphology

Kajk and C

ak remain conservative, preserving the distinct forms of the dative,

instrumental and locative in the plural of the nominal declensions – unlike

tokavian, where these forms have coalesced (in the old dual forms -ma, 5.4.1).

Of the last group, the Slavonian area also retains all plural case forms.

The Torlak dialects show ‘‘Balkan’’ features: loss of the infinitive, and the use of

periphrastic devices to replace Verb þ Infinitive constructions; the decline of the

cases to a maximum of three (nominative and non-nominative/oblique, plus, in

some, dative) though with retention of the vocative; doubled objects with the

additional object pronoun; retention of the aorist and imperfect; and post-positive

articles – all features shared with Bulgarian and Macedonian.

The Zeta sub-group (S

tok/Jek), in Montenegro, has an intermediate plural

nominal case system, with syncretization of dative/instrumental and genitive/

locative.

Table 10.2 shows the expected transition between Kajk, and to a lesser

extent C

ak, and Slovenian, and between south-east S

tok (Torlak) and

Bulgarian and Macedonian. The column ‘B/C/S’ here means ‘‘standard’’ in all

three areas.

10.2.3 Dialects of Macedonian

FYR Macedonia is bordered by Albania in the west, Serbia in the north, Bulgaria

in the east and Greece in the south. Varieties of Macedonian are spoken across the

border in all of these countries, though the extent of this dialectal spread and

vitality is not easy to determine. In Albania there could be between 5,000 and

10.2 South Slavic 507

150,000 Macedonians, but the census data are equivocal. In Serbia there is a

transitional dialect chain leading north, notably through the Torlak dialects

(10.2.2). In Bulgaria there may be as many as 250,000 Macedonian speakers, but

the Bulgarians regard these Pirin dialects, together with the language varieties

spoken in FYR Macedonia, Albania and Greece, merely as south-western dialects

of Bulgarian. For their part, the Greeks reject a country called ‘‘Macedonia’’, since

they consider the name to have been Greek since the times of Alexander the Great

of Macedon (fourth century

BC), and have been culturally unsympathetic to the

Vardar Macedonian dialects spoken in Northern Greece, which have been sub-

jected to vigorous hellenization.

The dialects of Macedonia are divided conventionally into an eastern (E-Mac)

and a western (W-Mac) group, the boundary roughly following a SSW–

NNE line along the Rivers Vardar and Crna. There are about half a million

speakers in each area, with somewhat over 300,000 in the dialectally mixed

capital, Skopje. The national language, which was formally established only in

1944–1945, reflects central western dialects (WC-Mac) in the area of Bitola,

rather than those of Ohrid in the south-west. Some analyses also propose a

northern dialect, situated between Skopje and the border, as a transition to

Serbian (NE-Mac).

Table 10.2. Dialects of B/C/S

B/C/S Kajk C

ak S

tok Torlak

Phonology

pitch þ¼CS ¼ CS ¼ CS

length þ¼CS ¼ CS ¼ CS 

jers ae¼ CS ¼ CS

o˛ uo¼ CS ¼ CS ¼ CS

e/(i)je e e/i e/je/i e

tj c

/t’ ¼ CS ¼ CS

dj dz´ (dj/d

)

j/dzˇ j ¼ CS ¼ CS

final /l/ o l ¼ CS ¼ CS a/l

final voice þ¼CS ¼ CS ¼ CS

Morphology

cases in plural 4 6 6 ¼ CS 3

Vocative þ¼CS ¼ CS

Infinitive þ¼CS ¼ CS ¼ CS 

Aorist/Imperfect ( þ ) þþ

Syntax

doubled object ¼CS ¼ CS ¼ CS þ

508 10. Dialects