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
affricates, 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 unvoiced 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.