Govor Preševa

Abstract

Preševo municipality is situated in the furthest south of Serbia, from the Macedonian border in the south, the administrative border with Kosovo and Metohija in the west and the municipalities of Bujanovac and Trgovište in the northeast. It covers the town center of Preševo and 34 villages. This area is mostly inhabited by Serbs and Albanians. The speech in Preševo area, considered in the context of the Serbian dialectology, was the subject of Danilo Barjaktarevic research (Preševo-Bujanovac speaking zone), but its analysis and conclusions set out in forty pages, are fragmentary and, at the very least, incomplete. In addition, numerous sociological events began to change the picture of the of the Serbian language prevalence in this part of Serbia. This work emerged as a result of a need for a more detailed study of Serbian speech in Preševo area. The analysis of Serbian speech in Preševo municipality was done in two ways: 1. The first part of the paper deals with the classical dialectological processing of the collected material from Preševo town and its villages, 2. The second part of the paper includes the urban Preševo speech based on modern sociolinguistic methods. The paper consists of four chapters: Introductory remarks, Phonetics, Morphology, Syntax, Sociolinguistic movements, Concluding remarks and Texts. The conclusions that largely represent novelties in lingua geographical sense are made in the first part (the second, third and fourth chapter), while the second part (the fifth chapter) according to its statistical results suggests possible directions for Serbian Preševo speech. The conclusions that were reached in the work: 1. According to all its properties Preševo speech belongs to the southernmost type of South-Morava speech, to Prizren-Timok dialect area, which is characterized by Macedonisms: the withdrawal of the accent from the last syllable, paradigmatic accent, -u in the first person singular in present tense, generalizing -le in the plural of active verbal adjective; 2. Presevo speech is marked by distinctive analytism reflected in the doubling of personal pronouns with the use of adverbs; 3. It is shown that the Preševo area is rich in isoglosses represented on the maps in the work; 4. The sociolinguistic analysis brought the results that indicate the reduction of dialectal features in the town speech, which is even more emphasised in the case of diglossia. The study of Preševo speech raises the question of unexplored speeches in neighboring areas (such as Bujanovac), and implicitly suggests the need for research of speeches in small towns of Prizren-Timok dialect area, as well as other Serbian dialects.