Morphosyntactic Characteristics of the Serbian Language as a Non-Mother Tongue Language Spoken by Albanian Learners

Abstract

In this paper wе examine morphosyntactic characteristics of the Serbian language spoken by the ethnic Albanian students at the “Sezai Surroi” high school in Bujanovac. In adopting the Serbian language, students transmit the parameters from their native Albanian language (aspect, reflexive verbs, prepositional-case constructions) and in contact with the inhabitants of Serbian nationality they adopt the Serbian language which is full of dialectisms of this speech zone. Our goal is that through contrastive (by comparing features of Prizren-Timok dialect, standard Serbian and Albanian language) and analytical methods (we give examples obtained on the basis of a questionnaire that we conducted) examine possible interference on the adoption of Serbian as a non-mother tongue in this multi-ethnic environment. According to the results of questionnaire, we conclude that in adopting of a non-mother language should be taken into account, structurally speaking, the manner in which the parameters in two languages are reflected (in our case, reflexive verbs and the way of expression the differences in aspect) and semantically speaking, the scope of meaning achieved by using certain syntactic units (prepositions in Albanian; cases in the Prizren-Timok dialect), which is yet another proof of the existence of syntactic-semantic interface.