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Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / A8 Dialects 524 / 600

A8 Dialects

This chapter uses specific stress symbols,

different than in the rest of Easy Croatian.

(This chapter is under construction.)

I'll give a brief overview of dialects in Croatia and neighboring countries.

Croatia belongs to the South Slavic language area, and to the wider Slavic area. Both

these areas are essentially dialect continua, that is, areas where any dialect is similar

to the dialect next to it, which is similar to the one next to it, and so on: difference

between dialects increases with distance, and there are very few sharp dialect

borders.

Many features of South Slavic dialects change roughly in the northwest-southeast

direction, represented by the arrow in this map:

(The arrow should go, and does go further into Macedonia and Bulgaria, but I will

concentrate on dialects in Croatia and countries next to it.)

Going in the direction of the arrow (i.e. to the south-east), features change in this

way:

• There are fewer noun forms (that is, different case endings). In Slovenia, nouns

have singular, dual and plural forms, and 6 cases with different endings in plural. In

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