PHONOLOGY OF THE DIALECT OF SMIŠLJAK IN EAST GORSKI KOTAR

Abstract

The paper discusses the phonological system of Smišljak on the basis of the authors field work. According to the previous studies, dialect of Smišljak is a part of the eastern subdialect of kajkavian Gorski kotar dialect and it has been depict for this research as a representative dialect of it’s central group. The article contains analysis of inventory, distribution and origin of vowels, consonants and prosodic units.
The vowel system of Smišljak dialect is of a monophthong type – it consist of 6 phonemes in short syllables and 5 phonemes in long syllables. There are no differences between the reflexes of yat, front nasal and etymological e. The syllabic  is consistently transformed into the vowel u, while the o-reflex is dominant in the case of the back nasal. In addition to this, the vowel u can also be found in the position of the back nasal. The semivowel produces the vowel a in long, and ə in short syllables (dˈān, pˈəs). The reflexes of the semivowel in unstressed syllables are the same as in long ones, that is, examples with both a and ə in this position can be found, and frequently doublets such as donˈesəl || donˈesal can be found in the speech of a single speaker.
The consonant system contains 23 units and has the following characteristics: one pair of affri-cates, reflexes of  and j in the place of the original * and *, the consonant cluster r-, l > ļ before the long and the short stressed u (occasionally even before i: gˈūļit, krˈūļit), unchanged original *ļ and *ń, final -l, stable v-prothesis, stable status of the phoneme x in its etymological position as well as protheses before the syllabic , replacement of voiced consonants by unvoi-ced ones in the final position and the replacement of the sonant v by the fricative f at the end of the word and before unvoiced consonants.
In the idiom of Smišljak the contrast between the rising and falling accents no longer exists. Stressed syllabic vowels can be long or short while the unstressed ones can only be short, that is, in this idiom unstressed long vowels no longer exist. As a result, this system has two accents (ˈ, ˈV) and unstressed short vowels. Both accents can be in all three positions within a word and, with respect to the basic Kajkavian accentual system, deviations are relatively numerous.
With the exception of the local idiom of Lukovdol, which was studied and described in 1960s by Vida Barac-Grum and Božidar Finka, the Kajkavian idioms of the eastern Gorski kotar subdialect have until recently been barely studied. Only more recent studies of this dialectologically extremely heterogeneous area have contributed to their better understanding and classification. The phonological description of the idiom of Smišljak is therefore intended as a contribution to a better understanding of the Kajkavian idioms of eastern Gorski kotar.