Dialects up close

Lesson opening

This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.

Dialects up close: where the borders lie, how the south sounds and how to listen

The lesson “Dialects of Serbian” gave you the map: five zones, two axes (yat and the accent), the telltale features of each region. This lesson is about what lies beneath it. A dialect border is a belt, not a line. The four accents you learned do not live all over the country. The south-east builds its sentences almost without cases, and scholars have argued for more than a century about what to call it. The map itself was drawn largely by the migrations of the last few centuries. And at the end, the point of it all: how to understand a dialect without slipping into it yourself.

A dialect border: a bundle of lines, not one line

A dialectologist does not ask “where does this dialect end?” but “where does this feature end?”, and draws one line. Then a second, a tenth, a hundredth. The five zones on the map appear where the lines gather into bundles. Here are five such lines, one by one.

What matters is row three against row four. In Jagodina they say kod babu “at granny’s”, but gde, not kude: two “southern” features end roughly a hundred kilometres apart. So the border of the Torlak dialects is not a line on the road but a belt tens of kilometres wide, where some features are already there and others not yet. Near it, “which dialect is this?” stops making sense; the right question is “which features does this speaker have?”

Hence the answer to “how many dialects does Serbian have?”: as many as the features you count as important. Five zones are a coarse grid; inside each, dialectologists tell smaller local dialects apart.

Stress in the dialects: from four accents down to one

The lesson “Words told apart by accent” promised to show what becomes of the four accents (short or long, rising or falling) outside the standard. The picture is reassuring: the system that cost you so much effort lives in two zones of five.

The first row differs from the rest as younger from older, not better from worse. In the dialects the standard rests on, the stress once stepped one syllable towards the start of the word and turned rising (the lesson “Dialects of Serbian”): vòda, nòga, sèstra, jùnāk, národ (water, leg, sister, hero, people). The old dialects mostly never took that step and keep the earlier place: vodȁ, nogȁ, sestrȁ, junȃk, narȍd. A rule for the ear: stress on the last syllable. The standard never allows it, so vodȁ with the stress at the end marks a speaker from the south or east, from Sandžak or Montenegro.

Torlak up close: a noun without cases

The lesson “Dialects of Serbian” named the main feature of the south-east: after a preposition, one all-purpose form, opšti padež “the common case”. Here is the whole picture. How far it goes depends on the place and the speaker: remnants of the old cases can still be heard in places, and in its fullest form the noun keeps three forms: the nominative, the vocative and the common form, which looks like the accusative. Prepositions do the rest.

The preposition na has taken over both the dative (“to whom”) and the possessive genitive (“whose”), just as in Macedonian and Bulgarian (and much as English uses to and of). And notice what is missing: any difference between “where” and “where to”. The standard distinguishes Idem u Niš “I’m going to Niš” and Živim u Nišu “I live in Niš”; Torlak says u Niš in both. The lesson “Map of case overlaps” showed single forms shared by two cases; here the system went all the way.

The second big difference is the article, a real article like English the, grown onto the end of the word, as in Bulgarian and Macedonian. It is not found everywhere, mostly in the easternmost dialects: ženata, seloto, ljudite “the woman, the village, the people” (the ones we know). Some dialects even have three, by distance, as Macedonian does: ženata the known one, ženava this one, right here, ženana that one, over there (standard: ta žena, ova žena, ona žena). Standard Bulgarian has kept only the first. For standard Serbian the article is utterly foreign.

Cheat sheet

The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.

Dialects up close: cheat sheet

A dialect border is a bundle of single-feature lines; between bundles, transition belts; no break anywhere, across state borders too. Lines do not coincide: kod babu from Jagodina, kude only from Niš.

Stress by zone

The standard moved the stress one syllable left; the old dialects keep the old place: vodȁ, nogȁ, junȃk, narȍd → vòda, nòga, jùnāk, národ. Final stress = not standard: south, east, Sandžak, Montenegro.

Torlak: noun, verb, comparison

The debate: Serbian linguists: Old Shtokavian; Bulgarian: western Bulgarian; Macedonian (for their own): northern Macedonian; some: a transition belt. The Serbian side points to sounds: noć, kuća, međa as in the standard, not Bulgarian nošt, kăšta, mežda; the other to grammar.

Why the map looks like this; the price of the standard

• Migrations of recent centuries, northwards from the south and south-west: East Herzegovinian spread far; Šumadija = Ekavian + four accents; the south-east left aside; a big city is a melting pot, not a dialect.
• Price: an accent not everyone grew up with; the bookish Slavonic-Serbian tradition cut off; the old dialects without a written norm.

Where speech points

Not all non-standard speech is dialect: ja bi, trebam da (substandard) and sestra od Marka (casual) are heard everywhere and say nothing about a region.