Current dialectological research in Serbian linguistics and language contact issues

Abstract

Examined in this paper is the attitude of current Serbian dialectology towards phenomena that are the subject matter of contact linguistics. The aim of the study is to show which types of contact situations and their outcomes are investigated by dialectologists and which are, by applying certain methodological procedures, excluded or at least minimised. The survey of the scholarly production in the field reveals that the attention has been given to the dialectal lexical and structural borrowings from the neigh bouring languages, as well as the interdialectal interference, the contact-induced Balkan innovations and analytic tendency in dialects (which are of particular significance for the study of the Balkan Sprachbund), the mutual influences of standard language and dialects, the sociolinguistic factors determining the dialectal variations that result from language contact, urban dialects and even bilingualism. It should be noted that not all issues have been equally addressed: some of them are well established in the field, while the others only give hints of possible future trends within the discipline. The observed changes in the focus as well as in methodology of its investigations make dialectology more open to the issues contact linguistics is interested in.