Dialect leveling in Haloze, Slovenia by Grant H. Lundberg (review)

In my description of Kajkavian dialects (the Northwestern group of Croatian dialects bordering on Slovenia; Lončarić 1996), I skipped over their relationship with Haloze, giving it less attention than other segments. This was because recent works on Haloze and on the neighboring Croatian Kajkavian dialects were lacking, as Zorko (1998) and Lundberg point out. There were basic reliable data for the Slovenian side but insufficient data on the Croatian side. After Zorko’s good overview and Lundberg’s good preliminary studies (1999, 2005a, 2005b), we now have this excellent monograph on the Haloze dialect or Haloze group. Unfortunately, we do not yet have a corresponding work for the Croatian area which would give us a full picture of this part of Slovenian-Croatian linguistic relations.¹

Lundberg’s monograph is dialectological and sociolinguistic. It considers the development of the system and its genesis from the reconstructed Slovenian and Croatian initial system in this area and explains the present state of the Haloze dialect group as a convergence of neighboring local dialects and the standard language. For particular periods of development he draws parallels with historical and political-territorial events on the border between the Austrian and Hungarian parts of the empire. I will look mainly at dialectological questions, particularly from the Croatian point of view.

The monograph has three large thematic chapters: chapter 2, Haloze Dialects, Meje and Belavšek; chapter 3, Historical Developments; chapter 4, Dialect Leveling in Haloze; along with the Introduction and Conclusion. In keeping with the considerations above, I will speak more about the dialectological, genetic side of the question.

Lundberg states that in this small area, as in all of Slovenia (and it is the same in the neighboring Croatian Zagorje), we have very extensive diversification of larger idioms, from macrodialects (dialect groups) down through bases, i.e., groups of local dialects to single local dialects, which are often quite different from each other.

Lundberg notes, as does Zorko, that Ramovš (1935) assigned Haloze to the Pannonian basis, while Rigler (1986) indicated a Styrian development. These opinions need not be contradictory and exclude one another since, as Lundberg shows, even in such a small space as Haloze there was an isogloss separating two developments, one Pannonian in the East and the other Styrian in the West, and perhaps in the center as well. The area was transitional, which is a normal situation even in the dialect continuum of a single language, and particularly so in border zones between closely related languages. Concentrating on Eastern Haloze, Lundberg did a detailed study of the locality Meje (in his first research Gorenjski Vrh), and for central Haloze he took Belavšek (as in his earlier work).

Ramovš overlooked certain vowel phenomena, important for the development of this group, at the meeting point of Styrian, Pannonian-Slovenian, and Kajkavian; Lundberg brings them out, and they clearly show the development of the vocalism. In prosody there is a quantity opposition (long—short) only in accented syllables; the place of accent is free. It is diachronically important that there is no lengthening of a short syllable (vowel) in a non-final syllable as there is in most Slovenian dialects, although not in Kajkavian. Lundberg uses the Slovenian term brata-lengthening, which is imprecise, since most Slovenian dialects lengthen every non-final short syllable, and not only the type that has come from an old, proto-Slavic long acute, a type that is lengthened in some Croatian (not only Kajkavian) dialects as well.

In Central Haloze the suprasegmental system is the same as in Eastern Haloze, but there is a difference in vocalism: in Eastern Haloze it is monophthongal without regard to the quantity, whereas in Central Haloze the long vowels are diphthongal. Western Haloze is significantly different from Eastern and Central in prosody: the accented syllable/vowel is long. Unfortunately Lundberg does not present any Western Haloze local dialect and does not state explicitly whether the given rule...