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387 CHAPTER 22 171 Dialect differences South Slavic languages and dialects cover the geographical expanse from the Julian Alps in the northwest to the Aegean Sea and the Black Sea in the southeast. The northwestern corner of this area is inhabited by speakers of Slovenian, and the southern and southeastern areas are inhabited by speakers of Macedonian and Bulgarian. The broad range in between these two poles is inhabited by speakers of BCS (except, of course, for those inhabitants who speak non-Slavic languages such as Albanian or Turkish, or who speak West Slavic languages such as Slovak). In political terms, the BCS area contains the states (as of 2005) of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Serbia-Montenegro. Map 1 shows the location of these states with respect to neighboring states. Map 1. Political boundaries of South Slavic states CHAPTER 22 388 Croatian is the official standard language of Croatia, Serbian is the official standard language of Serbia (and, at the present writing, of Montenegro), and all three languages are official in Bosnia-Herzegovina. But if one wishes to describe how people actually speak over this broad geographical expanse, one must speak in terms of different local dialects, which shade gradually into one another as one moves from the far northwest to the far southeast. Speakers of any one dialect can understand the neighboring dialect easily, but the further away one moves from one’s native locale, the harder it is to understand the local speech. Furthermore, the differences are not directly correlated with political boundaries. For instance, villagers living on either side of the border separating any two states are able to understand each other quite easily even though they are technically speaking dialects of two different languages. Indeed, they usually understand their neighbors immediately across the border more easily than they understand their own compatriots who live near the opposite border of their own state. There are a great number of dialectal differences within the BCS area, all of which are defined in both linguistic and geographical terms, and only a few of which are part of the conscious awareness of their speakers. Those divisions of which speakers are aware, however, have strong associations for them with factors of national identity and/or cultural history. 171a. Štokavian, čakavian, and kajkavian dialects The primary division within BCS, one of which all BCS speakers are highly conscious, operates at a very broad level. There are three major dialects, each of which is so distinct from the others that speakers of any one of them usually have considerable difficulty understanding speakers of the other two. Indeed, if one follows the general linguistic criterion of mutual intelligibility, these three dialects would qualify much more readily as different languages than do standard Serbian , Croatian, and Bosnian (at least in their current state). The names of these three dialects are štokavian, čakavian and kajkavian. Most discussions of the former Yugoslavia which mention these dialects usually define them – correctly – by observing that their names derive from the word used for what in each dialect (što, ča, and kaj). Unfortunately, most of these discussions stop at this point, leaving their readers with the illusion that the three dialects differ only in terms of certain words, whereas in fact the differences are much more extensive. For instance, both kajkavian and čakavian have radically divergent accentual systems (differing not only from štokavian but also from each other), something which already makes their spoken form harder to understand. There are also other differences in the overall sound systems, as well as the grammar. For instance, where štokavian speakers will say ja ću ići for the 1sg. future tense of the word go, a male kajkavian speaker will say ja bom išel. That is, the lexical verb form is the L-participle (and a different form of it at that) rather than the infinitive, and the auxiliary is taken from a conjugation that does not exist in either štokavian or čakavian. Describing these three dialects is made even more difficult by the fact that there is great internal variation within each: there is no one single canonical čakavian, or kajkavian, or štokavian dialect. Each of the three is spoken over a broad, geographically definable area, as illustrated in Map 2. The štokavian dialect covers by far the broadest territory: all of Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia, and significant portions of eastern and southern Croatia. Standard BCS is štokavian only: indeed, it was largely the broad expanse over which this dialect...

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