Divergence Processes in the West South Slavic Dialect Divided by the State Border (Based on the Modern Dialect Speech of Eastern Serbia and Western Bulgaria)

Parts of Eastern Serbia and Western Bulgaria speak a so-called Torlak dialect divided by the state border. The authors of the study aim to determine whether the state border that has existed in the microregion since 1833 is also a language border. There was no data on whether modern linguistic situations are situations of diglossia or diaglossia, and their extent; on the role of the so-called “horizontal” differences resulting from territorial variation and “vertical” differences influenced by the standard languages or regiolects; on whether individual dialects diverge, develop advergently with the standards, or preserve their basic state opposing it to the norm. The object of the study is two geographically adjacent local border idioms spoken in the Timok River valley and the western slopes of the North-West Stara Planina (Knjazevac, Serbia) and in the eastern slopes of the Stara Planina (Belogradcik, Bulgaria), respectively called Timok-Zaglavak in Serbia and Belogradcik, or Stara Planina in Bulgaria. The authors detect and classify divergence processes in the dialect on quantitatively and qualitatively comparable material of spontaneous oral speech of representative informants; the speech samples are published. The authors used methods of field linguistics and synchronic descriptive dialectology to select informants for interviewing and collecting speech material, and methods of phonetic/phonemic transcription and historical-philological analysis of spontaneous oral text to analyse the material. In the course of the analysis, elements of more than forty dialectal differences characteristic of the basic Torlak dialect were contrasted with elements of dialectal differences characteristic of Serbian and Bulgarian standard languages or (supra-)regional East Serbian and North-West Bulgarian koine. The analysis shows that the Torlak dialect is still spoken in Eastern Serbia and Western Bulgaria, that there are no “horizontal” differences between the idioms of the dialect, and that the two idioms develop divergently. Divergence reflects the impact of standard languages and/or (supra-)regional koine, and each dialect develops advergently with its own, Serbian and Bulgarian respectively, national norms. The political border between Serbia and Bulgaria, limiting the communication of the Torlaks to either the Serbian or the Bulgarian national communities, respectively, and creating two situations of differently directed diaglossia, caused the division of the historically united community of dialect speakers into the clearly opposed Serbian and Bulgarian parts.

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