Torlakian dialect

Torlakian or Torlak is a name given to the group of South Slavic dialects of southeastern Serbia (southern Kosovo - Prizren), northeastern Macedonia (Kratovo-Kumanovo), western Bulgaria (Belogradchik-Godech-Tran-Breznik), which is intermediate between Serbian, Bulgarian and Macedonian.

Some linguists classify it as an Old-Shtokavian dialect of Serbian or a fourth dialect of Serbo-Croatian (along with Shtokavian, Chakavian, and Kajkavian). Other linguists classify it as a western Bulgarian dialect, in which case it is called Transitional. Torlakian is not standardized, and its subdialects significantly vary in some features.

Speakers of the dialectal group are primarily ethnic Serbs, Bulgarians, and Macedonians. There are also smaller ethnic communities of Krashovani in Romania (who mostly identify as Croats), and Gorani in southern Kosovo.

Classification

During the 19th century Torlakian and Macedonian dialects were often called Bulgarian, and Bulgarian and Serbian linguists and armies fought to draw the border between the both languages during the end of 19th and the first half of 20th centuries.^[1]

Most Serbian (like Pavle Ivić, Asim Peco) and Croatian linguists (like Milan Rešetar and Dalibor Brozović) classify Torlakian as an Old-Shtokavian dialect, referring to it as Prizren-Timok dialect.^[2][3] Serbian linguist Pavle Ivić argues that some Bulgarian dialects have more similarities to Serbian rather than vice versa, maintaining that the Prizren-Timok dialect is a fully Serbian vernacular, also stressing that the so-called Transitional Bulgarian dialects and the Shopi idiom have in some cases more Western South Slavic elements than Eastern.^[2][3] All old Bulgarian scientists as Krste Misirkov, Benyo Tsonev and Gavril Zanetov classified Torlakian as dialect of Bulgarian language. They noted the manner of the articles, the lack of most of the cases, etc. Today Bulgarian linguists (Stoyko Stoykov, Rangel Bozhkov) also classify Torlakian as a "Belogradchik-Tran" dialect of Bulgarian, and claim that it should be classified outside the Shtokavian area.

Torlakian dialects appear where Macedonian/Bulgarian blend into Serbian.

Features

Vocabulary

Basic Torlakian vocabulary shares most of its Slavic roots with Serbian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian, but also over time borrowed a number of words from Aromanian, Greek, Turkish, and Albanian in the Gora region of the Šar mountains. Also, it 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 need not necessarily understand a Goranac.

The varieties spoken in the Slavic countries has been heavily influenced by the standardized national language, 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 defeat of the Ottoman Empire. The Slavs indigenous to the region are called Krašovani (Krashovans), and are a mixture of original settler Slavs and later settlers from Timočka Krajina (eastern Serbia).

Cases lacking inflections

Macedonian and Bulgarian are the only two modern Slavic languages that lost virtually the entire noun case system, with nearly all nouns spoken in the surviving nominative case. This is also true of the Torlakian dialect. In the northwest, the instrumental case merges into the genitive case, and the locative and genitive cases merge into the nominative case. Further south, all inflections disappear and meaning is determined solely by prepositions.

Lack of phoneme /x/

Macedonian, Torlakian and a number of Serbian and Bulgarian dialects, unlike all other Slavic languages, technically have no phoneme like [x], [ɦ] or [h]. In other Slavic languages, [x] or [ɦ] (from Proto-Slavic *g in "H-Slavic languages") is common.

The appearance of the letter h in the alphabet is reserved mostly for loanwords, and toponyms within the Republic of 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 (also, Macedonian oro, ubav vs Bulgarian horo, hubav (folk dance, beautiful)). This is actually a part of an isogloss, a dividing line separating Prilep from Pehčevo in the Republic of Macedonia at the southern extreme, and reaching central Serbia (Šumadija) at a northern extreme. In Šumadija, local folk songs may still use the traditional form of I want being oću (оћу) compared with hoću (хоћу) as spoken in standard Serbian.

Syllabic /l/

Torlakian has preserved much of the ancient syllabic /l/, which, like /r/, can serve the nucleus of a syllable. This is still the case in some West Slavic languages. In Shtokavian dialects, the syllabic /l/ eventually became /u/ or /o/. In Bulgarian, it became preceded by the vowel represented by ъ ([ɤ] or [ə]), to separate consonant clusters. Not all Torlakian subdialects preserved the syllabic /l/ to the full extent, but it is reflected either as full syllabic or in various combinations with [ə], [u], [ɔ] or [a]. Naturally, the /l/ becomes velarized in most such positions, giving [ɫ].^[4]

Features shared with Eastern South Slavic

• Loss of grammatical case 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 Slavic ь and ъ in all positions (Bulgarian sən, Serbian san)
• Lack of phonetic pitch and length as in Bulgarian, present in Serbian
• Frequent stress on the final syllable in polysyllabilic words, impossible in Serbian (Bulgarian že'na, Serbian 'žena)
• Preservation of final l, which in Serbian developed to o (Bulgarian bil, Serbian bio)
• Comparative degree of adjectives formed with the particle po as in Eastern South Slavic,ubav, po-ubav, Serbian lep, lepše.
• Lack of epenthetic l, as in Eastern South Slavic zdravje/zdrave, Serbian zdravlje

Features shared with Western South Slavic

In all Torlakian dialects:

• ǫ gave labials u like Shtokavian Serbian, unlike unlabialized 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 /ɲ/ and /n/ is lost in Eastern (S.-C. njega, Bulgarian nego).
• Consonants in final position preserve their leniency (S.-C. grad, Bulgarian/Macedonian grat)
• *vs stays preserved without metathesis in Eastern (S.-C. sve, Bulgarian vse)
• Genitive njega as in Serbian, unlike old genitive on O in Eastern (nego)
• 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 (-ić) and *-atja (-ača) are common in Western, not known in Eastern

In some Torlakian dialects:

• Distinction between the plural of masculine, feminine and neuter adjectives is preserved only in Western (S.C. beli, bele, bela), not in Eastern (beli for masc., fem. and neutr.), 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 Serbian , 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.

Literature

Literature written in Torlakian is rather sparse, as the dialect has never been an official state language, and for the most part of the history literacy in the region was limited to Eastern Orthodox clergy, which chiefly used Old Church Slavonic in writing. The first known literary monument, influenced by Torlakian^[5] dialects is the Manuscript from Temska Monastery from 1762, in which its author, the Monk Kiril Zhivkovich from Pirot, considered his language as: "simple Bulgarian".^[6]

Ethnography

According to one theory, the name Torlak derived from the South Slavic word "tor" ("sheepfold" in English), referring to the fact that Torlaks in the past were mainly shepherds by occupation. Some scientists describe the Torlaks as a distinct ethnographic group.^[7][8] The Torlaks are also sometimes classified to be a part of the Shopi population and vice versa. In the 19th century, there were no exact border between Torlak and Shopi settlements. According to some authors during the Ottoman rule, the majority of native Torlakian Slavic population did not have national consciousness in ethnic sense. Therefore, both, Serbs and Bulgarians, considered local Slavs as part of their own people, while local population was also divided between sympathy for Bulgarians and Serbs. Other authors from the epoch, take a different view and maintain that the inhabitants of Torlakian area had begun to develop predominantly Bulgarian national consciousness.^[9][10] With Ottoman influence ever weakening, the increase of nationalist sentiment in the Balkans in late 19th and early 20th century, and the redrawing of national boundaries after the Treaty of Berlin (1878), the Balkan wars and World War I, the borders in the Torlakian-speaking region changed several times between Serbia and Bulgaria, and later Republic of Macedonia.

See also

• Balkan linguistic union
• Shtokavian dialect
• Shopi
• Gorani
• Krashovani

References

Sources

• БАН (2001) (in Bulgarian). Български диалектален атлас. София: Издателство "Труд". pp. 218. ISBN 954-90344-1-0. 
• Friedman, Victor (2006). "Determination and Doubling in Balkan Borderlands". Harvard Ukrainian Studies 1-4: 105–116. http://mahimahi.uchicago.edu/media/faculty/vfriedm/220Friedman09.pdf. 
• Friedman, Victor (2008). "Balkan Slavic Dialectology and Balkan Linguistics: Periphery as Center". American Contributions to the 14th International Congress of Slavists 1:Linguistics: 131–148. http://home.uchicago.edu/~vfriedm/Articles/213Friedman08.pdf. 
• A Handbook of Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian (by Wayles Brown and Theresa Alt)
• Стойков, Стойко: Българска диалектология, Акад. изд. "Проф. Марин Дринов", 2006.
• Dijalekti istočne i južne Srbije, Aleksandar Belić, Srpski dijalektološki zbornik, 1, 1905.
• Sprachatlas Ostserbiens und Westbulgariens, Andrej N. Sobolev. Vol. I-III. Biblion Verlag, Marburg, 1998.
• Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe, Glanville Price, Blackwell Publishing, p. 423.
• Language and Conflict: A Neglected Relationship, Dan Smith, Paul A Chilton - Language Arts & Disciplines, 1998, Page 59
• South Slavic and Balkan Linguistics, A. Barentsen, Rodopi, 1982
• Hrvatska dijalektologija 1, Josip Lisac, Golden marketing – Tehnička knjiga, Zagreb, 2003.
• The Slavonic Languages, Bernard Comrie, Greville G Corbett - Foreign Language Study, 2002, pp 382–384.