Pitch Opposition in Sele: Slovene Tone Loss in Austrian Carinthia

Abstract

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.