EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / A8 Dialects 525 / 600
the area around Niš, Serbia, there is only singular and plural, and only two cases (N
and A). In Macedonia, nouns have no cases! This doesn't apply to the vocative
case, though.
• There are more verb tenses in use. In the western parts of Croatia, the aorist tense
is very rarely used. It doesn't exist at all in Slovenia. In Serbia, it's used every day in
speech. When you reach Macedonia, there are 9 tenses.
• Infinitives are less used and finally disappear in South of Serbia, where only da +
present is used.
• Vocatives are more often used – in western parts of Croatia, vocatives are rare, N
is used when calling someone. In Bosnia and Serbia, they are frequently used.
• There are more Greek and Turkish loan words further you go to the south-east.
There are couple of forms that are specific for ‘west’ and ‘east’:
‘west’ ‘east’
you can moreš možeš
four men/boys četvero četvoro
Each feature splits the area at a different line. Standard Croatian has the ‘eastern’
možeš, but the ‘western’ četvero.
Furthermore, there's something interesting: most dialectal variation is in the
northwest. In the central and southeastern areas, there's less dialects on the same
land area. (That's due to history.) It's obvious from this simplified and not-tooaccurate
dialect map, showing the dialects in villages in middle 20th century (click on
the image to enlarge):