Torlak Accentuation (Slavistische Beiträge)

by Ronelle Alexander

In der Reihe Slavistische Beiträge werden vor allem slavistische Dissertationen des deutschsprachigen Raums sowie vereinzelt auch amerikanische, englische und russische publiziert. Darüber hinaus stellt die Reihe ein Forum für Sammelbände und Monographien etablierter Wissenschafter/innen dar.

806 pages, Perfect Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1975, Ronelle Alexander submitted a dissertation at Harvard University on the accentuation of the Torlak dialect of Serbian, which differs markedly from standard Serbian. The dissertation was then published by the Verlag Otto Sagner in the same year, and more recently an ebook has become available. The Verlag Otto Sagner printing is rather ugly as far as typesetting goes (the book is set in cold type, with underlining instead of italics, and very space-inefficient making the size unnecessarily swell to over 800 pages). The ebook now available is simply a scan of the Verlag Otto Sagner printing and so it shares the same flaws.

In spite of the aesthetic infelicities, this represents a valuable work on Serbian dialectology and the study of the South Slavic languages more generally. Alexander’s survey of accentuation in the Torlak dialect is based on a questionnaire that she applied in nine villages spanning the entire Torlak region, from Kosovo to the Bulgarian border. This makes the book a useful description of dialectal features and communities that are now lost in time, inasmuch as the Serbian population in some of her Kosovo sources have dwindled away, while elsewhere many of the distinct Torlak pronunciations found here have disappeared from modern speech due to younger people’s switch to more standard Serbian.