Torlakian dialects
Torlakian, or Torlak, is a group of transitional South Slavic dialects spoken across southeastern Serbia, southern and eastern Kosovo, northern North Macedonia, and northwestern Bulgaria. Torlakian, together with Bulgarian and Macedonian, falls into the Balkan Slavic linguistic area, which is part of the broader Balkan sprachbund.
Torlakian is not standardized, and its subdialects vary significantly in some features. Serbian linguists traditionally classified it as an old Shtokavian dialect or as a fourth supradialect of Serbo-Croatian along with Shtokavian, Chakavian, and Kajkavian. Bulgarian scholars classify it as a Western Bulgarian dialect, in which case it is referred to as a Transitional Bulgarian dialect. According to UNESCO's list of endangered languages, Torlakian is a vulnerable distinct language.
In Bulgarian common speech, the Torlakian dialects are traditionally referred to as U-dialects, referencing their reflex of old Slavic *ǫ being .
The Serbo-Croatian linguists maintain that Torlakian is a Balkanized Western South Slavic dialect together with the South Slavic varieties spoken in northern parts of North Macedonia and in Western Bulgaria. Other researchers tend to classify it as Eastern South Slavic. Motoki Nomachi maintains that the Torlakian dialects are foreign to standard Serbian in many cases. According to the historian Ivo Banac, during the Middle Ages, Torlak and the Eastern Herzegovinian dialect were part of Eastern South Slavic, but since the 12th century, especially the Shtokavian dialects, including Eastern Herzegovinian, began to diverge from the other neighboring South Slavic dialects.
Some of the phenomena that distinguish western and eastern subgroups of the South Slavic languages can be explained by two separate migratory waves of different Slavic tribal groups of the future South Slavs via two routes: the west and east of the Carpathian Mountains.
Speakers of the dialectal group are primarily ethnic Serbs, Bulgarians, and Macedonians. There are also smaller ethnic communities of Croats and Slavic Muslims in southern Kosovo.
Classification
The Torlaks have been distinguished from other South Slavic languages since at least the 16th century and their dialects form an intermediate between the Eastern and Western branches of South Slavic dialect continuum, and have been variously described, in whole or in parts, as belonging to either group. In the 19th century, they were often called Bulgarian, but their classification was contested between Serbian and Bulgarian writers. Previously, the designation "Torlakian" was not applied to the dialects of Niš and the neighbouring areas to the east and south.Balkan sprachbund
The Torlakian dialects, together with Bulgarian and Macedonian, display many properties of the Balkan linguistic area, a set of structural convergence features shared also with other, non-Slavic, languages of the Balkans such as Albanian, Romanian and Aromanian. In terms of areal linguistics, they have therefore been described as part of a prototypical "Balkan Slavic" area, as opposed to other parts of Serbo-Croatian, which are only peripherally involved in the convergence area. The Dutch linguist Willem Vermeer describes Torlakian as a creole language influenced by Albanian and Romanian.Balkan linguists
Serbian linguists
, one of the most important reformers of modern Serbian language, defines a Torlak as "a man who speaks neither Serbian nor Bulgarian well". Serbian linguists classify Torlakian as an Old-Shtokavian dialect, referring to it as the Prizren–Timok dialect.- Pavle Ivić, in his textbook of Serbo-Croatian dialectology, treated the "Prizren–Timok dialect zone" as part of the overall Shtokavian zone.
- Aleksandar Belić classified the Prizren–Timok dialect as "fundamentally Serbian", as well as claimed that the Western Bulgarian dialects were Serbian.
- Dejan Krstić in his scientific paper "Ideas of the Pirot region population that concern the term the Torlaks" has claimed that the term Torlaks was and is used to refer to the bilingual Vlachs in Pirot and Timok area.
Bulgarian linguists
Macedonian linguists
In Macedonian dialectology, the Torlakian varieties spoken in North Macedonia are classified as part of a northeastern group of Macedonian dialects.Features
Vocabulary
Basic Torlakian vocabulary shares most of its Slavic roots with Bulgarian, Macedonian and Serbian but also over time borrowed a number of words from Aromanian, Greek, Turkish, and Albanian in the Gora region of the Šar Mountains. It also preserved many words which in the "major" languages became archaisms or changed meaning. Like other features, vocabulary is inconsistent across subdialects, for example, a Krashovan does not necessarily understand a Goranac.The varieties spoken in the Slavic countries have been heavily influenced by the standardized national languages, particularly when a new word or concept was introduced. The only exception is a form of Torlakian spoken in Romania, which escaped the influence of a standardized language which has existed in Serbia since a state was created after the withdrawal of the Ottoman Empire. The Slavs indigenous to the region are called Krashovani and are a mixture of original settler Slavs and later settlers from the Timok Valley in eastern Serbia.
Cases lacking inflections
Bulgarian and Macedonian are the only two modern Slavic languages that lost virtually the entire noun case system, with nearly all nouns now in the surviving nominative case. This is partly true of the Torlakian dialect. In the northwest, the instrumental case merges with the accusative case, and the locative and genitive cases merge with the nominative case. Further south, all inflections disappear and syntactic meaning is determined solely by prepositions.H-dropping
Macedonian, Torlakian and a number of Serbian and Bulgarian dialects, unlike all other Slavic languages, technically lack the phonemes, or. In other Slavic languages, or is common.The appearance of the letter h in the alphabet is reserved mostly for loanwords and toponyms within the Republic of North Macedonia but outside of the standard language region. In Macedonian, this is the case with eastern towns such as Pehčevo. In fact, the Macedonian language is based in Prilep, Pelagonia and words such as thousand and urgent are iljada and itno in standard Macedonian but hiljada and hitno in Serbian. This is actually a part of an isogloss, a dividing line separating Prilep from Pehčevo in the Republic of North Macedonia at the southern extreme, and reaching central Serbia at a northern extreme. In Šumadija, local folk songs may still use the traditional form of I want being oću compared with hoću as spoken in standard Serbian.
Syllabic /l/
Some versions of Torlakian have retained the syllabic, which, like, can serve the nucleus of a syllable. In most of the Shtokavian dialects, the syllabic eventually became or. In standard Bulgarian, it is preceded by the vowel represented by ъ to separate consonant clusters. Naturally, the becomes velarized in most such positions, giving.In some dialects, most notably the Leskovac dialect, the word-final -l has instead shifted into the vocal cluster -ja; for example the word пекал became пекја. Word-medially however the syllabic /l/ remains unaltered.
Features shared with Eastern South Slavic
- Loss of most grammatical cases as in Bulgarian and Macedonian.
- Loss of infinitive as in Bulgarian and Macedonian, present in Serbian.
- Full retention of the aorist and the imperfect, as in Bulgarian.
- Use of a definite article as in Bulgarian and Macedonian, lacking in Serbian.
- ə for Old Church Slavonic ь and ъ in all positions: sən, dən, including in the place of OCS suffixes -ьць, -ьнъ.
- Lack of phonetic pitch and length as in Bulgarian and Macedonian, present in Serbian.
- Frequent stress on the final syllable in polysyllabic words, impossible in Serbian and Macedonian.
- Preservation of final l, which in Serbian developed to o.
- Comparative degree of adjectives formed with the particle po as in Eastern South Slavic ubav, poubav, Serbian lep, lepši.
- Lack of epenthetic l, as in Eastern South Slavic zdravje/zdrave, Serbian zdravlje
- Use of što pronoun meaning what, as in Eastern South Slavic rather than šta as in standard Serbian and of the standard Bulgarian kakvo.
Features shared with Western South Slavic
- ǫ gave rounded u like in Shtokavian Serbian, unlike unrounded ъ in literary Bulgarian and a in Macedonian
- vь- gave u in Western, v- in Eastern
- *čr gave cr in Western, but was preserved in Eastern
- Distinction between Proto-Slavic and is lost in Eastern.
- Voiced consonants in final position are not subject to devoicing, Bulgarian/Macedonian pronounced '
- *vs stays preserved without metathesis in Eastern
- Accusative njega''' as in Serbian, unlike old accusative on O in Eastern
- Nominative plural of nomina on -a is on -e in Western, -i in Eastern
- Ja 'I, ego' in Western, as in Eastern
- Mi 'we' in Western, nie in Eastern
- First person singular of verbs is -m in Western, and the old reflex of *ǫ in Eastern
- suffixes *-itjь and *-atja are common in Western, not known in Eastern
- Distinction between the plural of masculine, feminine and neuter adjectives is preserved only in Western, not in Eastern, does not occur in Belogradchik area; in some eastern regions there is just a masculine and feminine form.
- The proto-Slavic *tj, *dj which gave respectively ć, đ in Serbo-Croatian, št, žd in Bulgarian and ќ, ѓ in Macedonian, is represented by the Serbian form in the west and northwest and by the hybrid č, dž in the east: Belogradchik and Tran, as well as Pirot, Gora, northern Macedonia. The Macedonian form occurs around Kumanovo.