Post
by michael mills » 24 Nov 2003 10:34
I once attended a lecture on the Slavic dialects of Yugoslavia. The aim of the lecture was Croat nationalist, aiming to prove on the basis of dialect distribution that the whole of Yugoslavia west of Serbia was once inhabited by Croats. Nevertheless, it was full of fascinating information.
It appears that the languages called Slovene, Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian are all entirely artificial constructs, and do not correspond to any actual dialectal differences.
According to the lecturer, the dialects spoken in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia ans Serbia are divided into three groups, Kajkavian, Chtokavian and Chakavian, based on the word for "what". These three groups do not correspond to any ethnic or geographic boundary, or to the four standard languages mentioned above.
Thus modern standard Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian are all based on a dialect spoken in Herzegovina, and belong to the same dialect group (I think it is chtokavian). Thus they are very similar.
Modern standard Slovenian is based on a dialect belonging to the Kajkavian group (at least that is what I remember from the lecture - correct me if I am wrong), and therefore differs markedly from the other three. However, the dialect of Zagreb is also Kajkavian, and so is closer to standard Slovenian than to standard Croatian.
In fact, as I recall from the lecture, different groups of Croats speak dialects belonging to all three groups; they have no linguistic unity, only an artificial cultural unity based on religion.
There is another way of classifying the dialects according to the pronunciation of "e"; ekavian, jekavian, ijekavian and ikavian. The dialects spoken in Serbia are ekavian, those spoken in Dalmatia are ikavian, and most of the dialects spoken in Croatia proper are ijekavian. I cannot remember which group the dialects spoken in Slovenia belong to.
But it all goes to show that the differences between the Slavic nations of the former Yugoslavia (except the Macedonians, who are really Western Bulgars) are highly artificial, and do not correspond to linguistic differences.