On a Recent Article on Developments in Gender in Slovene Dialects. A Personal Note

The article compares the lexis of the Kostel dialect of the Slovenian language and the dialect of the villages Pitve and Zavala, which belongs to the South Chakavian vernacular of the Croatian language. The study is based on lexicographic data. The analyzed dialects of the Slovenian and Croatian languages contain 17.08 % of common lexis. 19.58 % (217 in each dialect) of the common lexis are loan words. Both among common and differential words, Germanisms are prevalent in the Slovenian dialect as well as Romanisms in the Croatian dialect. Many internationalisms came into the Slovenian dialect through the German language, and into Croatian through Italian and its dialects. Two dialects also share several Turkisms; in addition, the lexis of the Kostel dialect of the Slovenian language contains Romanisms that could find different ways into it, through other Slovenian dialects or the Croatian language.

The dual is a mandatory element of Contemporary Standard Slovene, the language used in literature and in official writing and speech, and also appears in the majority of Slovene dialects to varying degrees. The monograph Dvojina v slovenskih narečjih examines the features and uses of the dual as they differ from one area of Slovene linguistic territory to the next. Using the methods of linguistic geography, an attempt is made to present, on a series of linguistic maps, the different ways in which Slovene dialects use the dual in verbs, pronouns, nouns, adjectives and the numeral dva/dve ‘two’. The morphological maps presented make extensive use of material gathered for the Slovenski lingvistični atlas (Slovene Linguistic Atlas). Part I provides grammatical, morphological and historical background to the dual. It takes a close look at previous research into the dual in Slovene and introduces the ongoing Slovene Linguistic Atlas, which furnishes the material for the detailed study of the dual in Slovene dialects that follows in Part II. Part II concludes with a typology, statistics on dual use and a summary of findings.

The article offers an overview of Slovene in the region Friuli-Venezia Giulia (Friulian: Friûl-Vignesie Julie, Slovene: Furlanija – Julijska krajina, German: Friaul-Julisch Venetien) in the north-easternmost part of Italy, where Slovene is present in its historical linguistic setting alongside the Italian-Slovene national border. In fact, the presence of the Slavic linguistic element which eventually developed into Slovene in that territory dates back to the period of the settlement of Slavic populations in that area in the second half of the 6th century AD. From the viewpoint of linguistic genealogy, Slovene dialects in Friuli-Venezia Giulia unambiguously form part of the Slovene dialect continuum. From a sociolinguistic point of view, Slovene was officially recognised as a minority language by the Italian Republic by the language protection act for the historical linguistic minorities in Italy in 1999. However, the actual level of legal protection and the “health” of Slovene in the Italian minority context differs from region to region. The actual state of affairs depends predominantly on the availability of public education in Slovene and, consequently, its official use in formal contexts. In the Provinces of Trieste/Trst and Gorizia/Gorica, where Slovene is used as the teaching language in Slovene monolingual education up to the university level (i.e. 13 years of education from 1946), intergenerational transmission of Slovene as the mother tongue can be observed, with a balanced use of different linguistic varieties: the use of dialect or other substandard varieties in informal contexts and Standard Slovene (alongside Italian) in formal contexts. On the contrary, in the Province of Udine/Videm, the situation is significantly more complex. In those regions where at least elementary Italian-Slovene bilingual education also exists in Standard Slovene, it is the local Slovene dialects as well as Standard Slovene that are used in public. This is the case of the Natisone/Nadiža Valleys, where starting in 1984 a five-year bilingual schooling system was implemented, extended to eight years in 2008. In stark contrast to that, the Torre/Ter Valleys and the Resia/Rezija Valley, where Standard Slovene is absent from the educational system, witness very limited public representation of local Slovene dialects and/or Standard Slovene, which is more or less characterised by occasional use. The last part of the contribution provides a case study illustrating in more detail the role of Slovene in the Val Canale (Slovene: Kanalska dolina, German: Kanaltal, Friulian: Val Cjanâl).

This paper discusses the gender changes that can take place in neuter nouns in Slovene dialects on the basis of number (singular, plural and dual). Using linguistic geography methods and material collected for the ongoing ‘Slovene Linguistic Atlas’ (SLA), the forms of a selected neuter noun are presented on three linguistic maps, which show the geographical spread of the gender changes. The paper also draws a comparison with earlier syntheses of these phenomena in Slovene.

It is well known that peripheral territories are places of enhanced interest in dialectology because they are likely to contain archaisms, i.e., internal dialectal retentions, as well as innovations as a result of external language contact.1 The situation in the Slovene dialects in Austrian Carinthia is a good illustration of this point. Ramovs indicates that the Carinthian Slovene dialects are full of archaisms (1935: 2). Most of these dialects have indeed maintained archaic tonal oppositions, although innovative accentual peculiarities are not uncommon (Greenberg 2000: 25). In this light the prosodic systems of these dialects are doubly interesting because in other peripheral dialect regions external language contact has been identified as the likely cause of tone loss. By contrast, here it appears that the intense two-way contact between Carinthian Slovene and Bavarian dialects has helped to preserve tonemic distinctions (Neweklowsky 1999: 23, Greenberg 56; but see Reindl 60–62). Moreover, the specific nature of these distinctions in the dialects of Austrian Carinthia is not well known and, therefore, is worth a closer examination. This paper is a description of an instrumental analysis of the realization of tonemic oppositions in Sele, a micro-dialect within the larger Slovene dialect area of Rož in Austrian Carinthia. Sele is located just north of the Slovene border and about 20 kilometers south of Klagenfurt. See figure 1 below.

This paper examines the proportion between borrowed and non-borrowed words in Slovene dialects. The vocabulary is presented through linguistic geography, while lexical maps of Slovene dialect vocabulary from the semantic fields of 1) ‘human body’, 2) ‘family’ and 3) ‘friends’ show the spatial distribution of lexemes in Slovene dialects.

The dual is a grammatical expression of number in some languages (e.g. Slovene, Sorbian or Modern Standard Arabic) that denotes two persons or objects. In modern Indo-European languages, the dual is an archaism and one that has been preserved only in a small number of Slavonic languages: in Slovene, Upper and Lower Sorbian and Cassubian; in other Indo-European languages the dual has been replaced by the plural. This paper will present this specific grammatical category as preserved to the present day in Standard Slovene, Colloquial Slovene and various Slovene dialects, and enable more precise comparisons and contrasts to be drawn with the dual in all three forms of the Slovene language.

Dialectology work on Slovenian linguistic territory primarily uses ad hoc abbreviations or labels for research points or areas when defining the geographical range of individual linguistic features for efficiency. The numeric marking of places in the Slovenski lingvistični atlas (Slovenian Linguistic Atlas, 2011–) is the most established, but less communicative. The SLOnar system (standing for slovenska narečja ‘Slovenian dialects’) makes possible the uniform designation of geographical data in Slovenian dialectology. By combining individual abbreviations in it, one can unambiguously designate the dialect group, dialect, subdialect, and research point (and the country where the place studied is located) all the way down to the individual speaker or informant.

The purpose of the paper is to describe the use of full forms of personal pronouns in the function of clitic ones in Slovenian dialects, which is an archaic phenomenon of modern Slovenian dialect syntax. Our tasks included mapping this phenomenon on the basis of the 2505 pages of dialect speech records we analyzed, made by Slovenian researchers and dialect speakers.It is noted that, as a rule, in Slovenian dialects, the full forms of personal pronouns in the function of short ones do not vary in syntactic position: they are found either only in the clitic position, or only outside it. Regardless of position, the full accusative and genitive forms of singular personal pronouns in the function of short ones are found less frequently and in a smaller area than the full dative forms.The result of the research is a map of the phenomenon in question and its detailed description. The areas of full pronoun forms in the function of short ones are out-lined. Outside the clitic position they form a dispersed area in the South-West dialects, and in the clitic position they form four lateral areas of different sizes and densities. This is a continuous eastern area with a core in the Prekmurje dialect, a dense northern area with a core in the Rosen Valley dialect, a compact area with a core in the Lower Sava Valley dialect and a dotted southern one in the Kostel dialect.It is concluded that the data of modern Slovenian dialects do not reflect the relative chronology of the emergence of pronominal clitics. There are many separate microsystems in dialects in which the dichotomy of full and clitic pronoun forms is at different stages of formation.

The material collected for producing lexical linguistic maps and defining typical areas of designations in Slovenian dialects in Austrian Carinthia includes expressions denoting ‘slap’. The majority of these designations are expressive, and they also share an unclear or onomatopoetic origin. Based on a comparison of the meanings of etymologically and word-formationally related vocabulary, these designations can be classified into semantic groups. The areal distribution of designations for ‘slap’ is classified into several types of areal distributions of vocabulary in Austrian Carinthia.

On a Recent Article on Developments in Gender in Slovene Dialects. A Personal Note

Tjasa Jakop's The dual in Slovene dialects makes an important contribution to the detailed study of Slovene dialectology.

Besednemu redu se v slovenskem jezikoslovju v preteklosti ni posvečalo veliko pozornosti, čeprav je prva razprava na to temo izšla že v letih 1891–1892. Napisal jo je Matija Murko, ki je obravnaval besedni red pri naslonkah in naslonskem nizu. Večina razprav je v preteklosti analizirala besedni red v umetnostnih besedilih, šele v zadnjih petnajstih letih pa se na Slovenskem pojavljajo tudi razprave o besednem redu v spontanih govorjenih besedilih.Pričujoči prispevek obravnava besedni red v govorjenem narečnem jeziku glede na pravila stalne stave v slovenskem knjižnem jeziku, pri čemer se osredotoča samo na izbrana pravila stalne stave. Analiza besedil iz vseh slovenskih narečnih skupin je pokazala, da besednoredne značilnosti slovenskih narečnih govorjenih besedil lahko razdelimo v tri skupine. Prva skupina značilnosti, kot npr. izhodiščni položaj naslonk v izreku, je značilna za besedila iz vseh narečnih skupin, zato lahko rečemo, da gre za splošno značilnost slovenskega narečnega diskurza. Druga skupina zajema značilnosti, ki jih najdemo samo v besedilih določene narečne skupine, npr. ločena stava členka ne in glagola v primorskih narečjih ter stava preteklega deležnika glagola biti na koncu izreka v panonski narečni skupini. Tovrstne značilnosti lahko razumemo kot posebne značilnosti posameznih slovenskih narečnih diskurzov. Tretja skupina značilnosti pa so tiste značilnosti, ki jih sicer najdemo v besedilih vseh narečnih skupin, vendar pa se razlikujejo v pogostosti rabe, npr. stava levega ujemalnega pridevniškega prilastka in desnega samostalniškega prilastka in predložne zveze v samostalniški besedni zvezi ter stava osebne in neosebne glagolske oblike na koncu izreka. Pogostost rabe je v takih primerih tisto merilo, ki pokaže, ali je besednoredna značilnost ustaljena in jo zato lahko razumemo kot ustaljeno besednoredno različico v narečju oziroma narečno besednoredno pravilo ali pa je sporadična in kot taka rezultat osnovne zakonitosti govorjenega jezika, tj. kratkega načrtovalnega časa, ki ne dopušča premišljenega strukturiranja izrekov.

The paper discusses the oxytonic mokȁ ‘flour’, bradȁ ‘beard’ type accent in the central Prosnid–Porčinj–Subid belt of the Ter dialect based on the material from Janoš Ježovnik‘s 2022 monograph. This type of accent is often interpreted in Slovenian accentology and dialectology as being innovative because the retraction of the short accent from a final open syllable to a preceding length is usually regarded as a Common Slovene innovation. This type of accent is found in the following types of forms: words like mokȁ, words like gensg kjučȁ, words like vinȍ, adjectives like mladȁ and participles like treslȁ (the oldest speakers still seem to preserved inconsistent length in these forms). The progressive shift of the *jùžina ‘lunch’ > Porčinj južȅ̥na type is clearly a distinct process and the infinitival opposition of *pećȉ but *rásti (with the innovative accent in the second longroot type) is to be connected with a typical Kajkavian-Čakavian-Western Štokavian non-phonetic ‘retraction’ of accent in certain forms (such as the infinitive). The author concludes that central (Prosnid–Porčinj–Subid) Ter dialects (and some other Slovene dialects like Kobarid) preserve the old Slavic final accent in open syllables even after the originally long root.

Whenever leading Slovene intellectuals were in the position todecide about a large-scale solution to the literary language question,there was to be a fierce debate for several years, with the minimalist view eventually prevailing. Representatives of three differently motivated movements, the Reformation, Illyrism and Neo-Illyrism, tried to restore the linguistic unity among the South Slavs (mostly excluding the Bulgarians from the start). Accordingly, the literary language for all South Slavs was to be based either on one of the regional dialects, aiming for a wider reading public in order to spread the reformation doctrine also among the uneducated, or it was to be the language of sophisticated literature, based on lexical and morphological featurescommon to most South Slavic dialects, in order to create a nation by creating a national literature for all South Slavs (or, sometimes even wider, for all Slavs). In the third period, in the Neo-Illyrist movement, the idea was to create a common literary language for the useof all inhabitants of a Yugoslav state after the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy: the identification of its citizens with their state was to be strengthened by linguistic unity. The Slovenian clergy's, writers' and intellectuals' attitudes towards suggestions for a common South Slavic literary language, the topic of discussion in the present paper, appear to be mostly rather skeptical than friendly, and, while there were among the Slovenes men like Sebastian Krelj in the 16th, Stanko Vraz and Matija Majar-Ziljski in the 19th and Fran Ilešič in the20th century, who played the parts of protagonists of a wider concept of literary language, fusing the Slovene and the Croatian dialectal basis, there were others who took a minimalist point of view at least as decidedly, accepting nothing outside the Slovene dialects as a basis for a literary language used by Slovenes. The best known among themwere Primus Truber, Jernej Kopitar, France Prešeren and Ivan Cankar, and it was their minimalist notion of the Slovene literary language that each time prevailed in the end. Now, at the end of the 20th century, the Slovene literary language is, for the first time in history, on its way towards validity in all fields of private and public life in the Republic of Slovenia.