Ćeský jazykový atlas [Atlas of the Czech Language] (review)

The work reviewed here is a linguistic atlas of the Czech language (hereafter “the Atlas”) that has recently been completed by the dialectological team of the Institute for the Czech Language of the Czech Republic’s Academy of Sciences, based on research conducted between 1964 and 1976 in 420 rural communities and 57 cities in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. Completed last among the atlases of West Slavic languages, it offers a detailed picture of the geographical diversification of Czech, and it introduces several interesting innovations, such as the inclusion of syntactic phenomena. In addition, the Atlas makes reference to the Czech dialects spoken in several locations outside the Czech Republic—Poland (one community), Croatia (four communities), Bosnia and Herzegovina (one community), Serbia and Montenegro (two communities), and Romania (five communities).

Because this work contributes to a better understanding of the social and cultural development of the society as reflected in the Czech language, it is of interest to linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists. To give a few examples: features of urban speech are compared directly with features of rural speech; the speech of urban youth is compared with the speech of their grandparents. And special care was given to selecting informants from the country’s border areas, most of whom were resettled there only after World War II to replace the German-speaking population that was either deported or chose to move to Germany.

The first three volumes record the geographical distribution of selected words of a number of semantic domains, among them those pertaining to kinship, body parts, diseases, bodily activities, foods, kitchen utensils, gardens and orchards, fauna, flora, landscape, time and weather, amusements, customs, farmsteads, farmwork, livestock, and poultry. Altogether, 774 headwords and thousands of their regional or local dialectal equivalents are discussed and their geographical location shown on maps. Thorough commentaries accompanying each map consist of six sections: (1) a list of all elicited responses; (2) a definition of the headword and the result of the field inquiry; (3) the geographical distribution of the headword and of its dialectal equivalents from a linguistic viewpoint; (4) an analysis of the lexemes shown on the maps explaining the development of the dialectal variants over time, using as sources the existing dictionaries of Old Czech, dictionaries published during the period of the national revival (from the end of the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century), modern dictionaries of Standard Czech, dictionaries of regional dialects, and etymological dictionaries of Czech; (5) relevant documentation from the dialects of Czech-speaking enclaves outside the Czech Republic; and (6) references to other linguistic atlases, primarily West Slavic.

Volume 4 concentrates on dialectal differences in morphology. The word classes examined here are nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals, and verbs. The commentaries correspond to those of the preceding volumes but in addition draw on historical grammars of Czech.

Volume 5 is divided into sections dealing with phonology, syntax, adverbs, and supplementary research on urban localities. Some of the items in the syntactic section (pp. 458–504) illustrate the means of expressing relationship between clauses or parts of a sentence—for example, natož ‘let alone, even’, an adverb used to intensify the meaning of what follows, has seventeen main dialectal variants and several dozen additional subvariants. The volume concludes with a set of summary maps based on the maps of all five volumes. These offer a new and more detailed classification of Czech dialects and reveal relationships between the bundles of isoglosses and the various administrative boundaries of the past that facilitated or hindered communication between speakers of the various regional or local dialects.

The large-sized volumes (twelve inches by eight-and-a-half inches) are well designed and printed and contain over sixteen hundred two-color maps. The Atlas offers a complete picture of the regional differentiation of spoken Czech...