Current dialectological research in Serbian linguistics and language contact issues

Abstract

Examined in this paper is the attitude of current Serbian dialectology towards phenomena that are the subject matter of contact linguistics. The aim of the study is to show which types of contact situations and their outcomes are investigated by dialectologists and which are, by applying certain methodological procedures, excluded or at least minimised. The survey of the scholarly production in the field reveals that the attention has been given to the dialectal lexical and structural borrowings from the neigh bouring languages, as well as the interdialectal interference, the contact-induced Balkan innovations and analytic tendency in dialects (which are of particular significance for the study of the Balkan Sprachbund), the mutual influences of standard language and dialects, the sociolinguistic factors determining the dialectal variations that result from language contact, urban dialects and even bilingualism. It should be noted that not all issues have been equally addressed: some of them are well established in the field, while the others only give hints of possible future trends within the discipline. The observed changes in the focus as well as in methodology of its investigations make dialectology more open to the issues contact linguistics is interested in.

U radu se ispituje odnos savremene srpske dijalektologije prema pojavama koje su predmet proučavanja kontaktne lingvistike. Razmatra se koji su tipovi kontaktnih situacija i pojava izazvanih jezičkim kontaktima proučavani u okviru ove jezičke discipline, a koji se pak primenom metodoloških postupaka isključuju ili svode na najmanju moguću meru. Pregledom literature iz ove oblasti ustanovljeno je da su dijalektolozi posvećivali pažnju leksičkim i strukturnim pozajmljenicama uglavnom iz susednih jezika, međudijalekatskoj interferenciji, procesima analitizacije i balkanizacije indukovanim jezičkim kontaktima (a važnim za istraživanja balkanskog jezičkog saveza), zatim uzajamnim uticajima standardnog jezika i dijalekata, sociolingvističkim faktorima koji uslovljavaju variranja proistekla iz kontakata različitih varijeteta, urbanim dijalektima, pa čak i bilingvizmu. Treba imati u vidu da nisu sve ove teme ispitivane u jednakoj meri, te da su neke od njih manje-više fundirane u okviru dijalektologije, dok druge predstavljaju tek naznake mogućih daljih pravaca razvoja ove discipline. Uočene nove tendencije u izboru predmeta i u metodologiji dijalektoloških istraživanja čine dijalektologiju otvorenijom za probleme koji zanimaju kontaktnu lingvistiku.