Chakavian dialect: Encyclopedia II - Chakavian dialect - Characteristics

Chakavian dialect - Characteristics

Čakavian dialect is divided along several criteria. According to the reflex of old Slavic phoneme yat (which is explained on Shtokavian dialect page) it is categorized as:

1. ekavian (northeastern Istria, Rijeka)
2. ikavian-ekavian (islands Krk, Pag, Lika region)
3. ikavian (western Istria, islands Brač, Hvar, Vis, Korčula, Pelješac)
4. ijekavian (Lastovo island)

Other linguists have combined phonetic and phonological criteria, resulting in 6 groups of subdialects:

1. Buzet dialect
2. southwest Istrian or štokavian-čakavian
3. northern čakavian or ekavian čakavian
4. middle čakavian or ikavian-ekavian
5. southern čakavian or ikavian čakavian
6. Lastovo dialect or ijekavian čakavian

There is no unanimous opinion on the set of traits a dialect has to possess to be classified as čakavian (rather than admixture with štokavian or kajkavian), but the following traits are frequently encountered:

• interrogatory pronoun is "ča" or "zač"
• old accentuation-3 accents
• phonological features that give /a/ for old Slavic phonemes in characteristic positions: "language" is jazik in čakavian and jezik in štokavian
• contracted aorist tense
• "j" where štokavian is characterized by "đ", and Bulgarian "žd": for "between", čakavian "meju", štokavian "među", and Bulgarian "meždu"

Due to its archaic nature and impressive corpus of developed early vernacular literary, čakavian dialect has attracted numerous dialectologists who have meticulously tarced nuances of it, so that čakavian is among the best described Slavic dialects. The representative modern work in the field is Čakavisch-deutsches Lexikon, 1.-3, Koln-Vienna, 1979-1983, authored by Croatian linguists Hraste and Šimunović and German Olesch. More — Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts is currently engaged in editing multivoluminous dictionary of Čakavian literary language, based on the wealth of literature written in čakavian.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Characteristics", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki