Some Tendencies in the Morphosyntax of the Migrational Shtokavian Dialects in Albania (Shijak and Myzeqe) and Slavic-Albanian Language Contact

Abstract

This article puts into academic circulation the materials of the little-described migrational Shtokavian dialects in the Shijak (Durrës) and Myzeqe (Fier, the villages of Rreth Libofsha, Hamil, etc.) areas collected during a linguistic expedition in July and August 2021. The Sandžak region (Novi Pazar, Tutin and Sjenica, modern Republic of Serbia), where the Shtokavian Novi Pazar-Sjenica dialects have been traditionally spoken, is considered a homeland for the descendants of the Myzeqe Muslim Slavs. The Muslim Slavs from the Shijak region (Borake and Koxhas villages) migrated to Albania from the vicinity of Mostar (modern Bosnia and Herzegovina). Their linguistic origin is from Central Herzegovinian dialects (mostly to the east of the Neretva River) between the younger Ikavian and Eastern Bosnian dialects. The generations-long contact with the Albanian language intensified as a result of increased social mobility resulting from socio-political changes in Albania in 1990. These changes led to a number of quantitative and, to a lesser extent, qualitative changes in the migrational dialects at different language levels. Since the Albanian language is a part of the Balkan sprachbund, some of the changes support balkanizing processes in the structure of the dialects. Our material shows some signs of analytisation in the morphosyntactic / syntactic system (the prevalence of prepositional phrases over bare cases, infi nitive reduction, clitic doubling, etc.), which are associated with Albanian contact infl uence. The article also describes the principles we adhered to when collecting linguistic data, as well as the topics of ethnolinguistic questionnaires. Examples of dialect recordings are included in the appendix.