Bija san na lignjama: Dialektnivellierung in Dalmatien

Abstract

Traditional dialectology has focused primarily on questions concerning the classification of the dialects within today’s Croatian territory. Even though the considerable amount of shared features between southeast čakavian and štokavian-ikavian dialects spoken in Dalmatia is repeatedly mentioned by dialectologists and would suggest to look at the dialect situation of this region as a case of dialect leveling, no attempt has been made to investigate this potential regiolect on an empirical base. It has to be expected that recent developments led (and will lead) to further leveling, namely between urban vernaculars and idioms of smaller towns and villages. Based on the assumption that the speech of young speakers best reflects the dynamics of (recent) dialect change, the speech of one exemplary informant is analyzed in this paper with regard to the occurrence of selected dialect features and compared with traditional descriptions of local idioms of the region as well as with the urban vernacular of the city of Split.