South Slavs - Language

Language

South Slavic standard languages are:

• Bosnian
• Bulgarian
• Croatian
• Macedonian
• Montenegrin
• Serbian
• Slovene

In addition, there are also other South Slavic languages which do not constitute official status in any republic, but have recognised standard formats and are widely used by their speakers. The most common of these is Bunjevac. In addition, the Šokac language was formerly listed in the census conducted during the Austro-Hungarian administration. Today, Montenegrin is also in the accelerated process of being codified in Montenegro. It is slowly being revised, embracing local speech, following the lines taken for Bosnian following the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina from Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

The division of standard languages is orthogonal to the division based on genetic-dialectological criteria. Naming local dialects is made difficult by the fact that Slovenes from Austria and Italy are linked with their most remote South Slavic peoples - the Pomaks and Bulgarians of European Turkey - by a historical dialect continuum. In the 9th century all Slavic dialects formed one dialect continuum, which was subsequently broken after the arrival of Magyars in the area of middle Danube; the subsequent spread of the Germanic, Greek and Romance speakers separated the South Slavic group from West and East Slavic groups leaving it roughly its present-day areal distribution.

Furthermore, as a result of migrations caused by the invasion of Ottoman Turks, dialect continuum was broken in numerous places especially in the so-called "Central South Slavic" area, where some Slavic dialects like Čakavian and Kajkavian were suppressed at the expense of Štokavian, and some "transitional" dialects like Torlakian, originally belonging to West South Slavic group, but having experienced numerous shared innovations with Bularo-Macedonian dialects belonging to East South Slavic.

Major Slavic dialectal groupings are

• Kajkavian - named after the interrogative "kaj", the local word for "what", this dialect is spoken in Croatia and is closely related to the Slovene language (also a "kaj" language).
• Čakavian - named after the interrogative ča, the local word for "what", also an exclusively Croatian dialect
• Štokavian - the largest and most complex dialect chain, named after "što" - the local word for "what" - itself varies with increased distance. Its subdialect, Neoštokavian, is used as the base for standard Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin and Bunjevac, though in a bit different form (in yat reflex, cf. below)
• Torlakian - a non-standard dialect chain separating Western South Slavic and Eastern South Slavic language groups with radical differences, spoken in southern Serbia (including Kosovo), northern Macedonia and north-western Bulgaria, and by all Slavic ethnic groups local to the region, its features include a mixture of the western and eastern linguistic trends. It is also spoken by the Krashovan community in Romania, reflecting their previous geographical settlement.
• Macedonian - spoken across most of Macedonia. The standard Macedonian is based on the West-central subdialect. Several regional dialects exist.
• Shop dialect - a western Bulgarian dialect group bordering with Torlakian areas to its northwest, with Macedonian to its southwest and East Bulgarian to its east.
• East Bulgarian - the standard language of Bulgaria based on the central regions. Several regional dialects exist.
• Slavic (Greece) - spoken by the Slavic population of Greece, most notably by the Pomaks of Thrace. Often disputed as to whether belonging to Macedonian or Bulgarian, this non-standard language has its dialects sparse but varied according to geographical distribution; with the dialects of Thrace (Trakiya) being closer to Bulgarian, and the dialects of Florina (Lerin) and Edessa (Voden) being closer to Macedonian.

The dialects are often further subclassified on arbitrary isoglosses, such as the reflex of Common Slavic yat phoneme which had various reflexes in various Slavic dialects. Yat reflex is noted as a major distinction between Serbian and Croatian - while the former has two distinct variants, based on so-called Ekavian /e/ and Ijekavian /ie̯/ reflexes, the standard Croatian is based exclusively on the Ijekavian reflex /ie̯/.