The Position of Kajkavian in the South Slavic Dialect Continuum in Light of Old Accentual Isoglosses

Abstract

SummaryAll South Slavic languages, from Bulgaria in the South-East to Slovenia in the North-West, are part of a dialect continuum. This paper outlines the position of what is traditionally called Kajkavian in that continuum in light of old accentual isoglosses. Kajkavian shares several old prosodic-phonological isoglosses with Slovene (such as the rise of the neocircumflex), while on the other hand it is connected with Western Štokavian and Čakavian through some morphological-categorial accentual isoglosses (like the innovative accent of the infinitive and

Receptive multilingualism versus ELF: How well do Slovenes understand Croatian compared to Croatian speakers’ English?

“…As many authors (e.g. Ivić 2001;Kapović 2017) have noted, language varieties spoken across the territory of the former Yugoslavia form a dialect continuum, with Slovene being structurally and lexically distinct from the languages stemming from Serbo-Croatian, namely Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian. 2 Despite these linguistic differences, it is generally accepted that Slovenes understand Serbo-Croatian standard varieties sufficiently well to make sense of spoken or written discourse, although younger generations in Slovenia are thought to be less able to understand (Serbo-)Croatian compared to those who grew up in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Fras 2012).…”

“…Furthermore, linguistic interaction between Croatian and Slovene is also evident at the dialect level, given that the Kajkavian and Čakavian dialects of Croatian form a transition towards Slovene (Greenberg 2006). In fact, the Kajkavian dialect, which is mainly spoken in the north-west area of Croatia, has many features in common with Slovene, especially with the north-eastern dialects spoken in the regions of Prekmurje and Prlekija, including the interrogative/relative pronoun kaj ('what'), decomposition of intervocalic *ŕ > rj and neocircumflex retraction (Greenberg 2000;Kapović 2017).…”