Shtokavian


Shtokavian or Štokavian is the prestige supradialect of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language and the basis of its Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian standards. It is a part of the South Slavic dialect continuum. Its name comes from the form for the interrogative pronoun for "what": što. This is in contrast to dialects that are exclusive to Croatian language: Kajkavian and Chakavian.
Shtokavian is spoken in Bosnia and Herzegovina, much of Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia. The primary subdivisions of Shtokavian are based on three principles: one is different accents, second is the way the old Slavic phoneme yat has changed, and third is the presence of the Young Proto-Slavic isogloss. Modern dialectology generally recognizes seven Shtokavian subdialects.

Early history of Shtokavian

The early medieval Slavs who later spoke various Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian dialects migrated across Moldavia and Pannonia. According to Frederik Kortlandt, the shared innovations originate from a "Trans-Carpathian" homeland, and by the 4th and 6th century, "the major dialect divisions of Slavic were already established". Dialectologists and Slavists maintain that when the separation of Western South Slavic speeches happened, they separated into five divergent groups, more specifically two, one Slovene and a second Serbo-Croatian with four divergent groups - Kajkavian, Chakavian, Western Shtokavian and Eastern Shtokavian. The latter group can be additionally divided into a first and second. As noted by Ranko Matasović, "the Shtokavian dialect, on the other hand, was from the earliest times very non-unique, with the Western Shtokavian dialects leaning towards Kajkavian, and the Eastern Shtokavian to Torlakian". According to isoglosses, and presumed end of existence of the common Southwestern Slavic language around the 8th-9th century, the formation of the Proto-Western Shtokavian and Proto-Eastern Shtokavian linguistic and territorial unit would be around the 9th-10th century. According to Ivo Banac in the area of today's Slavonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and on the littoral between the Bay of Kotor and Cetina, medieval Croats spoke an old West Shtokavian dialect, which, some believe, stemmed from Chakavian, while medieval Serbs spoke two dialects, old East Shtokavian and Torlakian. Many linguists noted a close connection between Chakavian and Western Shtokavian, for example Pavle Ivić saw Chakavian as an archaic peripheral zone of Shtokavian, while Dalibor Brozović saw the majority of Chakavian dialects as derived from the same accentological core as Western Shtokavian. Western Shtokavian was principally characterized by a three-accent system, whereas Eastern Shtokavian was mostly marked by a two-accent system.
Western Shtokavian covered the major part of present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slavonia and part of Southern Dalmatia in Croatia. Eastern Shtokavian was dominant in Serbia, easternmost Bosnia and Herzegovina and greater parts of Montenegro. From the 12th century, both dialects started separating further from Chakavian and Kajkavian idioms. According to research of historical linguistics, Old-Shtokavian was well established by the mid-15th century. In this period it was still mixed with Church Slavonic to varying degrees. However, the ultimate development of Western Shtokavian and Eastern Shtokavian was not divergent, but convergent. It was the result of migrations, political-cultural border change and also caused by the Ottoman invasion. Initially two separate proto-idioms started to resemble each other so greatly that, according to Brozović, " we can no longer speak of an independent Western Shtokavian, but only about the better or weaker preservation of former West Shtokavian features in some dialects of the unique Shtokavian group of dialects".
As can be seen from the image on the right, originally the Shtokavian dialect covered a significantly smaller area than it covers today, meaning that the Shtokavian speech has spread for the last five centuries, overwhelmingly at the expense of Chakavian and Kajkavian idioms. The modern areal distribution of these three dialects as well as their internal stratification is primarily a result of the migrations resulting from the spread of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. Migratory waves were particularly strong in the 16th–18th century, bringing about large-scale linguistic and ethnic changes in the Central South Slavic area.
By far the most numerous, mobile and expansionist migrations were those of Ijekavian-Shtokavian speakers of eastern Herzegovina, who have spread into most of Western Serbia, many areas of eastern and western Bosnia, large swathes of Croatia. This is the reason Eastern Herzegovinian is the most spoken Serbo-Croatian dialect today, and why its name is only descriptive of its area of origin. These migrations also played a pivotal role in the spread of Neo-Shtokavian innovations.

Earliest texts of Shtokavian dialect

Proto-Shtokavian, or Church Slavic with elements of nascent Shtokavian, were recorded in legal documents like the charter of Ban Kulin, regulating the commerce between Bosnia and Dubrovnik in Croatia, dated 1189, and in liturgical texts like Gršković's and Mihanović's fragments,, in southern Bosnia or Herzegovina. Experts' opinions are divided with regard to the extent these texts, especially the Kulin ban parchment, contain contemporary Shtokavian vernacular. Numerous legal and commercial documents from pre-Ottoman Bosnia, Hum, Serbia, Zeta, and southern Dalmatia, especially Dubrovnik are mainly Shtokavian, with elements of Church Slavic. The first major comprehensive vernacular Shtokavian text is the Vatican Croatian Prayer Book, written in Dubrovnik a decade or two before 1400. In the next two centuries Shtokavian vernacular texts had been written mainly in Dubrovnik, other Adriatic cities and islands influenced by Dubrovnik, as well as in Bosnia, by Bosnian Franciscans and Bosnian Muslim vernacular aljamiado literature – the first example being "Chirvat-türkisi" or "Croatian song", dated 1589.

Relationship towards neighboring dialects

Shtokavian is characterized by a number of characteristic historical sound changes, accentual changes, changes in inflection, morphology and syntax. Some of these isoglosses are not exclusive and have also been shared by neighboring dialects, and some of them have mostly but not completely spread over the whole Shtokavian area. The differences between Shtokavian and the unrelated, neighboring Bulgarian–Macedonian dialects are mostly clear-cut, whereas the differences with the related Serbo-Croatian dialects of Chakavian and Kajkavian are much more fluid, and the mutual influence of various subdialects plays a more prominent role.
The main bundle of isoglosses separates Slovenian and Kajkavian on the one hand from Shtokavian and Chakavian on the other. These are:
  1. long falling accent of newer origin
  2. development of the consonant group rj from former soft /r'/ before a vowel
  3. reflexes of /o/ or /ọ/ of the old Common Slavic nasal vowel /ǫ/, and not /u/
  4. inflectional morpheme -o in the instrumental singular of a-declension
Other characteristics distinguishing Kajkavian from Shtokavian, beside the demonstrative/interrogatory pronoun kaj, are:
  1. a reflex of old semivowels of /ẹ/ ; closed /ẹ/ appearing also as a jat reflex
  2. retention of word-final -l
  3. word-initial u- becoming v-
  4. dephonemicization of affricates /č/ and /ć/ to some form of middle value
  5. genitive plural of masculine nouns has the morpheme -of / -ef
  6. syncretized dative, locative and instrumental plural has the ending -ami
  7. the ending -me in the first-person plural present
  8. affix š in the formation of adjectival comparatives
  9. supine
  10. future tense formation in the form of bom/bum došel, došla, došlo
Characteristics distinguishing Chakavian from Shtokavian, beside the demonstrative/interrogatory pronoun ča, are:
  1. preservation of polytonic three-accent system
  2. vocalization of weak jers in word-initial syllables
  3. vowel /a/ as opposed to /e/ after palatal consonants /j/, /č/, /ž/
  4. the appearance of extremely palatal /t'/ or /ć'/ and /j/ either in free positions or in groups št', žd'
  5. depalatalization of /n'/ and /l'/
  6. /ž/ instead of /dʒ/
  7. /č/ > /š/ before consonants
  8. word-initial consonant groups čr-, čri-, čre-
  9. conditional mood with biš in the second-person singular
  10. non-syncretized dative, locative and instrumental plural

    General characteristics

General characteristics of Shtokavian are the following:
  1. što or šta as the demonstrative/interrogative pronoun
  2. differentiation between two short accents, rising and falling, though not in all Shtokavian speakers
  3. preservation of unaccented length, but not consistently across all speeches
  4. /u/ as the reflex of Common Slavic back nasal vowel /ǫ/ as well as the syllabic /l/
  5. initial group of v- + weak semivowel yields u-
  6. schwa resulting from the jer merger yields /a/, with the exception of the Zeta-Raška dialect
  7. metathesis of vьse to sve
  8. čr- > cr-, with the exception of Slavonian, Molise and Vlah oasis-Burgenland dialect
  9. word-final -l changes to /o/ or /a/; the exception is the verbal adjective in the Slavonian southwest
  10. ď > /dʑ/ with numerous exceptions
  11. cr > tr in the word trešnja "cherry"; some exceptions in Slavonia, Hungary and Romania
  12. ć and đ from jt, jd ; exceptions in Slavonian and Eastern Bosnian dialect
  13. so-called "new iotation" of dentals and labials, with many exceptions, especially in Slavonia and Bosnia
  14. general loss of phoneme /x/, with many exceptions
  15. ending -ā in genitive plural of masculine and feminine nouns, with many exceptions
  16. ending -u in locative singular of masculine and neuter nouns
  17. augment -ov- / -ev- in the plural of most monosyllabic masculine nouns, with many exceptions
  18. syncretism of dative, locative and instrumental plural of nouns, with many exceptions
  19. preservation of ending -og in genitive and accusative singular of masculine and neuter gender if pronominal-adjectival declension, with exceptions on the area of Dubrovnik and Livno
  20. special form with the ending -a for the neuter gender in nominative plural of pronominal-adjectival declension esta and no ove m
  21. preservation of aorist, which is however missing in some areas
  22. special constructs reflecting old dual for numerals 2–4
  23. many so-called "Turkisms" or "Orientalisms", i.e. words borrowed from Ottoman Turkish
As can be seen from the list, many of these isoglosses are missing from particular Shtokavian idioms, just as many of them are shared with neighboring non-Shtokavian dialects.
There exist three main criteria for the division of Shtokavian dialects:
  1. Accentuation
  2. Yat reflex
  3. Young Proto-Slavic palatal consonant isogloss: *šć-''*žƷ and *št & *žd''. The isogloss developed between 7th and 8/9th century, and the former relates those dialects with Chakavian and Kajkavian, while the latter relates those dialects with Bulgarian.