About Lexical Differences between Old Shtokavian Croatian and New Shtokavian Serbian Dialects

Abstract

The article deals with lexical differences between two Shtokavian Serbo-Croatian dialects: the dialect of the village Siche (Slavonia, Croatia) which belongs to archaic Slavonian dialect, and the dialect of the village of Gospodjinci (Voyvodina, Serbia) belonging to the innovative Shumadia-Voyvodina dialect. The study is actual because there are no dialect atlases of Serbo-Croatian territory and detailed descriptions of lexical features of different Shtokavian dialects. The study uses the lexical material collected specially on the base of the questionnaire of the Serbian-Croatian dialect Atlas. The article compares the differential vocabulary of questionnaires from two named villages. The analysis shows that the main part of differential lexems in two dialects are loan words, mainly of Turkish origin, which replaced in the Voyvodina dialect the Slavic words preserved in Slavonia. Among the lexical differences there are a number of proto-Slavic synonyms, which presumably contrasted various proto-Serbo-Croatian dialects at the beginning of the second Millennium. The words of later origin based on Slavic roots are not very important in the lexical opposition of the two dialects. From geolingustic point of vew Slavonian and Voyvodina dialects present an opposition of Western and Eastern Shtokavian.