The Phoneme /o/ in Opoja Albanian: Albanian-Slavic Contact and the Slavic Jers

Abstract

The phoneme /o/ is often present in the Albanian dialect of Opoja in environments where it is absent elsewhere in Albanian. This paper explains /o/ in Opoja by reference to the Slavic substrate present in that area of Kosovo. Language shift from Slavic to Albanian took place in the late 16th and 17th centuries in Opoja, and I argue that during this process, Slavic /o/ was identified with Albanian /ə/. This identification was facilitated by the fact that the Slavic dialect of Opoja lay directly on a major isogloss of a crucial sound change in Slavic: the loss of hyper-short high vowels, also known as the jer shift. To the south of Opoja, the Slavic dialect of Gora has /o/ and /e/ from these hyper-short high vowels (known as jers in the Slavic literature), but to the north, the dialect of Prizren shifted both vowels to /ə/. This allowed Albanian /ə/ to be identified with the Slavic jer reflexes, which were then imposed on Albanian during the process of language shift.