A Preliminary Report on Dialectological Fieldwork in Northwestern Croatia: Brezova Gora and the Croatian-Slovene Dialect Continuum
ENGLISH: One of the more interesting questions in Western South Slavic dialectology is the relationship, both historical and modern, between the dialects of the Slovene and the Kajkavian Croatian speech territories. The debate over the origin and genetic relationship between these dialect regions goes back to Dobrovský in the early 19th century and was carried on by such scholars as of Belić, Ramovš, Ivšić, and more recently by Ivić, Vermeer and Greenberg. Contemporary Slavic linguists agree that the dialects of the Slovene and Kajkavian speech territories are part of a dialect continuum with almost all of the isoglosses which unite them being archaisms rather than shared innovations. Although it is clear that this is a dialect continuum, the political border between Slovenia and Croatia has had an important influence on dialect development in this area. This paper is a contribution to the pool of dialect data from the border region. It provides a brief description of the phonemic inventory of the Croatian village dialect of Mohenski in Brezova Gora. It also reports on developments in the prosodic system based on a spectrographic analysis of tonal oppositions in this dialect and compares the situation in Mohenski to the dialects just across the border in Slovenia. Based on the dialect forms in this study, Mohenski has much more in common with Kajkavian than with Pannonian Slovene dialects. (1) It has the merger of the jat and the jers, 'liet, 'dien. (2) The reflex of Common Slavic *o is distinct from that of the reflexes of Common Slavic *" and *è, which have merged in u, ke'koši, but 'puno and peosudili. Mohenski also exhibits several of Vermeer's secondary Kajkavian features, all of which it also shares with Bednja. (1) It has a velarized a. (2) The reflex of the jat is distinct from i and e. (3) The reflex of Common Slavic *o is fronted to e. (4) The reflex of the jat is a diphthong with rising sonority, ie. All prosodic oppositions including quantity oppositions have been lost in Mohenski. This is based on ...
