Variations: Traditional Dialects #1

N

A

D

G

L

24

I

V

If you would really like to learn dialects spoken in Croatia, a separate course or textbook would be needed. So far, nobody has written something like it, but it can be done. (Maybe I’ll find some time one day?) Consider this a lightweight overview.

Do you need traditional dialects? Essentially, no. But you’ll maybe hear some song in a dialect, or read a book which has some dialogues in a dialect. Or you maybe have a personal interest because your family comes from an area where a dialect is spoken.

For a long time, there was a general idea that only one dialect in Croatia is ‘proper’. There were literary works in other dialects, but they were mostly poetry and had a little influence. Children were discouraged from using their native dialects at school by most (but not all) teachers. So it seemed dialects were destined for oblivion. For reasons which aren’t completely clear, in mid 1960’s there was a kind of revival of traditional dialects in Croatia (there was another wave in 1990’s, which will be covered in the next chapter). A part of that revival was a music festival in Krapina, a town northwestern from Zagreb, dedicated to songs in the local dialect.

On a cold Sunday morning back in December of 1968, Ana Bešenić, a scared, modest and cold 15-year-old high school student from Petkovec, a small village near Varaždinske Toplice, north from Zagreb – from a home with only one lightbulb, turned off early each evening to save money – rang on the door of the home of composer and singer Zvonko Špišić in Zagreb. She told him she wrote some verses for the festival. He almost sent her home, but after reading the verses, he decided to write a tune; together, they adapted the verses a bit, and the song was performed in Krapina, by Vice Vukov, then a very popular singer. The song starts with this verse:

V jutro dišeče gda bregi su spali

a mesec još zajti ni štel

potiho sem otprl rasklimanu lesu

i pinklec na pleča sem del

It’s hopeless to look into almost any Croatian dictionary. You could ask someone who natively speak that dialect, or someone who at least understands words in this song. Luckily for you – everyone in Croatia understands these words, as the song became immediately very, very popular. Sung by professional singers, sung by common people in house parties, sung around campfires – sung even by some enthusiasts learning Croatian – it kind of became a folk song. We can start understanding it by explaining the verbs from the lines above:

deti (dene) perf. put dišati (diši) smell (pleasantly) otprti (otpre) perf. open

spati (spi) sleep šteti (hoče) want

Note that spati (spi) sleep feels archaic in most parts of Croatia today, but the verb zaspati (zaspi) inch. fall asleep was clearly derived from it many centuries ago.

These verbs have a bit specific forms:

dojti (dojde, došel, došla) perf. come
najti (najde, našel, našla) perf. find
zajti (zajde, zašel, zašla) perf. set (Sun and Moon)

The corresponding standard verb forms would be doći (...), naći and zaći. These dialects are among ones preserving older forms of these verbs (mentioned in the section Something Possibly Interesting in the chapter 42 Come In, Come Out, Go.)

The adjective dišeči is the present adjective of dišati (diši), so it means pleasant-smelling, i.e. fragrant.

The lines above translate as:

In a fragrant morning, [when hills were sleeping
And the Moon still didn’t want to set]
I quietly opened the rickety gate
And put the bag on my back

This song – Suza za zagorske brege A Tear for Zagorje Hills – is usually considered one of the greatest Croatian songs. Like a lot of very popular Croatian songs, it’s not in Standard Croatian. The song goes on:

Stara je mati išla za menom
nemo vu zemlu gledeč
Ni mogla znati kaj zbirem vu duši
i zakaj od včera nis rekel ni reč

In that dialect, instead of lj, there’s usually l: zemla ground, earth, country instead of zemlja, prijatel friend instead of prijatelj.

We also find some specific forms of the present tense of the verb be:

biti be	this dialect	standard
pres-1	sem²	sam²
neg. pres-1	nis	nisam
neg. pres-3	ni	nije

Almost immediately later, we have a line:

v suzah najenput sem bil

So, if v¨ is in – and it is – what’s the form suzah? It looks like a case of suza tear, we assume he was in tears, but what’s that case?

This is the locative case. In this dialect – and actually, in many old dialects – cases D, L and I are distinct in plural and have special, so-called older endings:

suza tear	older	standard
D-pl	suzam	suzama
L-pl	suzah
I-pl	suzami

(These endings are really older than the standard endings; Slovene, Russian and Polish have such endings.)

To help you decipher these two cases in chapters about dialects, they will be highlighted with different colors:  light green  for L and  green  for D, if you place your mouse over an example sentence – or touch it, if you use a touchscreen. Moving your mouse (or touching somewhere else) will remove the highlight.

In real life, some local dialects have slightly different endings, approaching standard ones. Many people mix their dialect and the standard language, so you’ll often see a mixture of endings. For example, a few lines later, we have (the preposition z¨ corresponds to both standard s¨/sa and iz¨; here it means with because it’s followed by I):

z rukami lice sem skril

This is one of the saddest lines in any Croatian song – he hid his face with his hands so that his mother couldn’t see he’s crying – and it’s also the line which was originally sung by Vice Vukov as z rukama, i.e. with the standard I-pl ending. However, all modern performances by bands using traditional instruments, and almost all other modern performances use the more characteristic z rukami with hands. (More about this song in the Examples section below.)

The song is in a dialect traditionally called ‘Kajkavian’. These dialects are named after the pronoun kaj what (compare it to the standard Croatian što). The colored areas on this rough map have (or had until very recently) this word for what in the local speech (or a very similar word):

The darker area is roughly where, besides the word kaj, there’s another feature: the word for wind has two same vowels, it’s veter  ▶ . Many other words have e where there’s a in standard Croatian in the whole kaj-area, such as megla fog, pes dog, steza path, and so on, but the same vowels in veter are specific for the darker areas. (Only a small number of these features appear in Zagreb speech today, due to immigration from other areas and influence of Standard Croatian.)

The darker area dialects have many interesting features and they could be considered a language on their own (actually, most dialects in Croatia can be considered languages – the difference is only in their social and political status; such issues will be explored later). An obvious feature is, of course, the word kaj what, and words derived from it:

nekaj something nikaj nothing

zakaj why

Another characteristic is the negative present tense of the verb moći (...) can; instead of e.g. ne može, it’s only one word: pres-3 is nemre, and it changes like a regular verb! Then, the future tense is formed with the present of the verb (bude) and the past form of the verb, but the verb (bude) has additional, shortened present tense forms. This table lists both verbs in the present tense:

pers.	(bude)		moći (...)	ne + moći (...)
1	bum		morem	nemrem
2	buš		moreš	nemreš
3	bu		more	nemre
1-pl	bumo		moremo	nemremo
2-pl	bute		morete	nemrete
3-pl	buju		moreju	nemreju

The pres-3pl ending of moći is -eju, compared to standard Croatian -u. This applies to other verbs with pres-3 in -e as well.

Another feature – you’ve likely already guessed it – the past-m ending for verbs is simply -l, which makes verb forms more regular than in Standard Croatian; for example, it’s just bil, bila...

There are also some specific forms of pronouns in the instrumental case:

pers.	‘Kajkavian’	standard
1	(z) menom	(sa) mnom
2	(s) tebom	(s) tobom

Why the form sem² instead of sam²? Why e in rekel vs rekla? Why veter? To answer these questions, another bit of history:

Roughly 1100 years ago, before any of the today dialects (some of which were later used as languages) in the Slovenia-to-Serbia area were differentiated, there was yet another vowel, which can be written as ə. For example, the pres-1 of biti be was səm², while the word for wind was větər. Many words had this vowel: pəs dog, kəsno late, tənək thin, məgla fog, stəza path, dənəs today etc. The past-m of reći perf. say was rekəl. We don’t know how ə was exactly pronounced (and it likely varied by region) but we’re sure it existed, since old writings have a special letter for it.

And then, in many dialects, the system got simpler. The vowel ə merged with other vowels, but it happened differently in different regions. In most dialects, it changed to a, but in the area around today Zagreb it changed to ě.

So after ə was gone, we had ě left, precisely the vowel that changed into either a plain e (giving rise to the ‘Ekavian’ prounciation), or i (in ‘Ikavian’ areas), and even into either ije or je. The last option happened in parts of Croatia and Bosnia, and that was taken as the basis of Standard Croatian.

But something else happened in the darker area: there ě usually has remained a separate vowel to this day. The word for wind there is actually větěr (the unstressed ě is often pronounced like e in English the), while e.g. the e in the word pet five is pronounced somewhat like a in English bad or e in English bed.

To illustrate this, here are these two words pronounced by a native speaker from a village short drive north from Zagreb:

pet  ▶  five

větěr  ▶  wind

Unfortunately, these two sounds are often spelled the same, and that gives the impression that ‘Kajkavian’ is ‘Ekavian’, but it’s not. (‘Kajkavian’ in towns such as Zagreb, Samobor and Varaždin was really ‘Ekavian’, but villages kept the older system.) Generally, these dialects have more vowels than Standard Croatian. Most of them distinguish short from long vowels, and in some dialects (roughly in the central Zagorje region) certain long vowels are pronounced as diphtongs (e.g. like English so, lake, etc.). Here are some examples:

diěte  ▶  child (spelled dijete, pronounced djete)
meese  ▶  meat (meso)
rouka  ▶  hand (ruka)
suonce  ▶  sun (sunce)

So, in this very dialect (examples are from a village in central Zagorje, near Zlatar) long ě is pronounced as iě, and sometimes written so. For comparison, forms spoken in Zagreb are given in brackets. In the word for meat, there’s simply a long e, which I spelled as ee.

Although many ‘Kajkavian’ dialects have such diphtongs, I’ve never heard a popular song in that dialect – they are likely considered too strange for outsiders.

Another interesting thing in some dialects (including this) is that regular neuter nouns and adjectives – like the word for meat – end in -ě or -e, and not in -o.

Futhermore, in ‘Kajkavian’ dialects (including the dialects in Slovenia) there’s one important constraint: normally, only stressed vowels can be long, i.e. there are no unstressed long vowels, while stressed vowels can be either long or short. Since the vowel length and stress often changes according to the word form (i.e. gender, case), this produces many alternations:

doběr (m) vs. duobra (f) good
rouka (N) vs. rukami (I-pl) hand

In the first word, the vowel lengthened in feminine because the short ě was lost; in the second, ou shortened because the stress moved to another syllable (note that this shift apparently doesn’t happen in the dialect of Suza za zagorske brege). As you can see, the system is far from trivial, and there are many local variations.

While there are more vowels than in standard, there are fewer consonants – no dž, no ć and usually no đ; some cluster are simplified, instead of e.g. svi all (people), the shorter si is used.

I haven’t answered why the word kaj in that area. Nobody knows.

Back to songs! Soon after the Tear, there was another song, just a bit less popular:

Dobro mi došel prijatel
vu stari zagorski dom
budi kak doma vu vlastitoj hiži
tu pri pajdašu si svom

We encounter the word hiža, meaning house. The fourth line has an interesting construction:

pri + D = std. kod¨ + G

Compare it with the standard verb prići come close, approach which also uses D (the verb is priti (pride, prišel, prišla) in this dialect, of course). The song continues:

Vre je stara hiža ova
al još navek tu stoji
nemreš srušit ovog krova
taj se ničeg ne boji

You’ve probably noticed the pres-2 form nemreš and interesting stress in present tense forms of some verbs: stoji he/she/it stands and boji se² he/she/it is afraid. Such stress is impossible in standard Croatian, but it can be guessed from it: verbs which have an underline – i.e. the fixed stress – in present tense forms in the standard stress scheme will have fixed stress one one syllable to the right in this (and many other) dialects:

	standard	“old” dialects
be afraid	boji se²	boji se²
hold	drži	drži
stand	stoji	stoji

‘Kajkavian’ dialects often conserve older forms of some words, such as some words starting with cr- in Standard Croatian:

	standard	‘Kajkavian’
intestines, hose	crijevo	črěvo, čriěvo etc.
black	crn	črn
worm	crv	črv

A lot of words used in ‘Kajkavian’ are not heard in Standard Croatian or are very rare; for example, this verb pair:

hitati (hiče) ~ hititi throw

Two more very characteristic ‘Kajkavian’ verbs are:

deti (dene) perf. put

zeti (zeme) perf. take

Unfortunately, it would be too much to go over all ‘Kajkavian’ characteritics, as a whole book could be written...

While Zagreb is generally shown as ‘Kajkavian’ on dialect maps, you’ll basically never hear stoji in Zagreb, except from people from some village who came to visit the city. Today, the speech of Zagreb has the following characteristics (some of them, like di, are not generally ‘Kajkavian’):

Features in Zagreb speech today
common     ↑     ↓ very rare	‘western pronunciation’
	di where kaj what, zakaj why... neg. pres-3 of can: nemre
	forms bum, buš...
	past-m forms in -l, words like pes
	zeti (zeme) perf. take, menom (I of ja)
	deca children, steza path, megla fog...

Another very frequent feature in Zagreb are shortened adverbs and conjunctions, e.g. ak if (vs. standard ako), tam there (vs. standard tamo), kam where to (vs. standard kamo), etc.

Soon after the Krapina festival was established, there were two TV series where ‘Kajkavian’ was mostly spoken: Mejaši, broadcast 1970, with 7 one-hour episodes (the word means people who share a meja border, i.e. neighbors), followed by Gruntovčani, broadcast 1975, with 10 one-hour episodes. It seemed ‘Kajkavian’ was going mainstream.

But, for some reason, it didn’t happen. Since 1980’s, no song performed in Krapina became really popular, and it’s hard to hear anything ‘Kajkavian’ in Croatian media today – even on the radio station called Kaj. Many people in Croatia still speak various ‘Kajkavian’ dialects in their daily life, but it’s hard to estimate how many; we can assume most people in rural ‘Kajkavian’ areas use it, but only a part of people living in larger cities. If we overlay black dots over our standard population map (where each dot represents 10,000 people), we get a picture like this:

There are some 90 black dots, which translates to roughly 900 thousands speakers, give or take (it all depends on the estimate of ‘true Kajkavian’ speakers left in Zagreb, mainly older people or people who came from the surrounding areas). This is a lot for Croatia. This is roughly the population of Dalmatia.

If so, why is there so little ‘Kajkavian’ in public, especially in comparison with an endless stream of ‘Ikavian’ songs from Dalmatia? It’s not easy to answer, and a part of the answer is in political events of the 19th century, which will be covered a bit later.

↓ Something Possibly Interesting (click to show)

While most books and articles endlessly repeat that the Croatia + Bosnia + Monenegro + Serbia area (or only Croatia + Bosnia) has three dialects (‘Kajkavian’, ‘Čakavian’ and ‘Štokavian’), all dialect maps I know of – except for maps in one recent but monumental book – magically stop at the Slovene border. However, people on the both sides of the border speak very similar dialects, and in some cases, identical ones; in any case, their speech is more similar than to e.g. ‘Štokavian’. Unfortunately, there has been a long established idea that people in Slovenia speak ‘Slovene’, while people in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia speak ‘Serbo-Croatian’. This might be true only from the standpoint of standard, written languages, but from the standpoint of traditional, village dialects, it’s very wrong.

Even worse, the strict division to three dialects is too rigid. Most differences are between ‘Štokavian’ and everything else to the west. ‘Čakavian’ is also simply a conventional name for a number of dialects which have some things in common, but also many differences; in the next chapter, you’ll see how ‘Čakavian’ in the Northern Adriatic area is quite different than in the south. However, some ‘Štokavian’ dialects have some things in common with the western dialects next to them. This is a classic example of dialect continuum. In such a case, dialects don’t “belong” to languages. Rather, some dialects were established as official and educational languages, or, in some cases, a mix of dialects was created and then promoted.

For these reasons, I’ve put traditional names of dialects in quote marks throughout this chapter.

The old vowel ə merged with some other vowel in dialects in today Croatia. However, there are dialects in Montenegro where ə has remained a separate vowel (or remained until very recently, when TV and radio started influencing speech a lot). In these dialects, it is (or was) pronounced as a vowel between the standard a and e, i.e. like the vowel in English bad.

There are many claims some dialects in Croatia are ‘older’, in a way they changed less over centuries. However, it’s hard to say which dialects changed more and which less. While ‘Kajkavian’ preserves older forms dojti, najti, suzah etc. and mostly conserves the separate vowel ě, it has lost ć and some tenses, such as the aorist tense, which are conserved in other regions. However, the dialect of Zagreb is for sure one of the least conservative dialects in Croatia.

↓ Examples (click to show)

This teen novel title features the verb form nemreš you can’t, characteristic for Zagreb and surrounding areas:

Also, the infinitive biti be is colloquially shortened, which is, of course, not specific for Zagreb. Literally, it translates as you can’t be smart, but in that part of Croatia that’s a frequent phrase meaning something a bit different:

negation + biti (je² +) + pametan (pametn-) = don’t know (what to do) (‘Kajkavian’)

Another, a bit bizarre example, is from a cardboard of UHT milk – milk which, unopened, can be kept on room temperature for months – made in Croatia, by a brand called z bregov, but for Serbian market:

What is the form bregov? It’s G-pl of breg, the ending is specific for many ‘Kajkavian’ dialects; the brand name means from hills (the manufacturer is from Varaždin, traditionally a ‘Kajkavian’ town). Below that, milk is written in ‘Ekavian’ (which is normally used in Serbia) and in the Cyrillic script, official in Serbia (in this word, the only difference from the Latin script is the letter L).

Another example is a road sign with the name of a village, showing the standard name Crni Lug, corrected with spray by someone to show the actual name as locals call their village – Črni Lug:

The following three songs are considered kind of anthems of the whole region around Zagreb, especially the region north of Zagreb (across the Medvednica mountain) called Zagorje (literally, lands across the mountain). All three are recent compositions, from the second half of the 20th century.

The first one is already mentioned Suza za zagorske brege, written by Ana Bešenić and Zvonko Špišić, and performed by many:

V jutro dišeče gda bregi su spali	In a fragrant morning, [when hills were sleeping
[a mesec još zajti ni štel	And the Moon still didn’t want to set]
[potiho sem otprl rasklimanu lesu	I quietly opened the rickety gate {m}
i pinklec na pleča sem del	And put the bag on my back {m}
stara je mati išla za menom	My old mother was walking behind me
nemo vu zemlu gledeč	Silently looking into the ground
ni moglamoči past-m znati [kaj zbiram vu duši]	She couldn’t know what [I felt in my soul]
i [zakaj od fčera nis rekelreči past-m ni reč]	And [why I didn’t say a word since yesterday] {m}
preveč smo toga povedat si si šteli	We wanted to say too much to each other
a se smo pozabili več	But we forgot everything

In the 5th line, we have za¨ + I in the meaning (moving) after, i.e. following. The form fčera corresponds to standard jučer yesterday: fč comes from vč.

Then we see preveč too much (compare with std. previše) and povedati tell. The last line has the verb pozabiti perf. forget and se all (compare with std. sve). The song continues:

Gda smo vre prešliprejti past-pl kraj najzadnje hiže	When we passed by the last house
v suzah najenput sem bil	I was suddenly in tears {m}
kaj ne bi to vidlavideti past-f stara mi mati	So that my old mother wouldn’t see it
s rukama lice sem skril	I hid my face with my hands {m}
sud oko mene su dišale rože	Everywhere around me, roses smelled
i bil je rascveteni maj	And it was flowery May
a ja nis ni jenput pogledal za sobom	And I didn’t look back even once {m}
od tuge nis mogelmoči past-m pozdraviti kraj	Because of sorrow, I couldn’t say goodbye to the land {m}
samo sem bregima dragim obečal	I just promised to the dear hills {m}
[da vrnul se bum nazaj]	[I will come back]
(Ana Bešenić)

The verb vrnuti (vrne) is another verb meaning return, used in many regions, not only ‘Kajkavian’.

You can see another feature of these dialects: masculine nouns have always short plural, e.g. from breg hill the N-pl is bregi, not bregovi.

The line 4 is here z rukama, but most modern performances have z rukami, which is a more traditional form of I-pl.

The song has been performed by many; maybe the best performance is by Tatjana Cameron, usually known as Tajči:

Ana Bešenić never wrote anything else approaching popularity of these verses.

The next song is Dobro mi došel, prijatel Welcome, My Friend, written for the 1970 Krapina festival:

Dobro mi došeldojti past-m, prijatel		Welcome to me, my friend
vu skromni zagorski dom		To a modest Zagorje home
budi kak doma, vu vlastitoj hiži		Be like at home, in your own house
tu pri pajdašu si svom		Here, you’re at your pal’s
(Viki Glovacki)

We can see kak how in the meaning kao like, as. The word pajdaš is something like pal, companion (it comes from Hungarian pajtás, but it seems Hungarian took it from Turkish, and Turkish maybe from Iranian – words can travel).

You can find many performances on YouTube; here’s the original by Vice Vukov:

The third song, Oko jedne hiže navek tiči lete Around a House, Birds Always Fly is a song written for the 1980 Krapina festival – and performed by Gabi Novak there – with a memorable (and kind of patriotic) chorus:

Oko jedne hiže		Around a house
navek tiči lete		birds always fly
kresnica na coklu		A firefly on a slab
celu noč bleščibleskati		shines all the night
tam te bude zemla		There, the ground will
zibala kak dete		rock you like a child
tam v zelenoj zipki		There, in a green cradle
domovina spispati		the homeland sleeps
(Drago Britvić)

We again see kak how used in meaning like, as.

Some words are a bit harder to understand: tič bird, cokl wooden slab, zibati rock, sway, zipka cradle. Some others, like hiža and kak we’ve seen in previous examples. The song has been performed a lot – it’s been considered ‘one of songs everyone from Zagorje knows’ – and there are many covers with bands performing with traditional instruments on YouTube.

Here’s a performance by Gabi Novak (when she was almost 80) in a traveling TV show which features traditional culture and performers:

Traditional songs from Međimurje, the most northern region of Croatia – a rather small, but densely populated region north from the Drava river – were often performed. One of them is Dej mi Bože O God, Give Me. It starts with:

Dej mi Bože joči sokolove		Give me, o God, eyes of a hawk
i šče k tomu perje labudovo		And feathers of a swan, too
kaj preletel črez široko morje		Who flew over a wide sea (lit: ‘through’)
i poljubil drago srce moje		And kissed my dear heart

This is a beautiful cover by Nina Kraljić, on the Croatian Public TV show A strana A Side; you can hear how she tries to pronounce all the original vowels in that dialect:

Some traditional songs found their way into pop and rock covers; one of the most covered has been another song from Međimurje, Klinček stoji pod oblokom A Boy is Standing Under a Window:

Klinček stoji pod oblokom		A boy is standing under a window
stoji pa gledi milu ružicu		Standing and looking at a dear rose
s črnim okom		with his black eye
z jednim okom namiguje		He’s winking with one eye
z drugim okom prisluškuje		Eavesdropping with the other eye
evo sam ti ja		Here I am
mila ružica		O dear rose
otpri vrata		Open the door

Rada bi ti otpirala		I would gladly open
samo da se nej oca, matere		Only if my father, my mother
ja bojala		I weren’t afraid of
kaj su tebi otec, mati?		What are your mother, father to you? (i.e what do they mean)
kaj su tebi sestre, brati?		What are your sisters, brothers to you?
evo sam ti ja		Here I am
mila ružica		O dear rose
ljubav prava		A true love

Lyrics look a bit weird: should’t there be evo sem...? Then, there’s stoji, stressed on the 1st syllable, and not stoji like we had in previous examples. There are many versions of the lyrics – look it up online – and most show some influence of Standard Croatian (there’s a famous rock cover by Azra, which was a first touch with this song for many; however, Štulić replaced even kaj with što and changed the meaning of some lines a bit; look it up).

The version above is as performed by Lea Šprajc, a young student of cultural anthropology and Croatian language and literature (and self-taught guitar player).

Here’s her video on YouTube, from a dimly lit cafe in Međimurje, with Lidija Bajuk, an established performer of traditional songs (Lea Šprajc is on the left):

Although it’s a great rendition – at least in my humble opinion – and there were articles in media about Lea Šprajc, the video got less than 5000 views in 8 years.

Mirko Švenda Žiga is rather popular performer of songs from Međumurje, often in modern arrangements. One of songs he performs is V Kotoribi cug-mašina fučnula:

V Kotoribi cug-mašina fučnula		In Kotoriba, a locomotive whistled
saka svega dva-tri pöt je kušnula		Each kissed hers two to three times
ako genegenuti cug-mašina, naj ideiti		If a locomotive starts, let it go
naj se draga svojim dragim rezidereziti		Let lovers split

Međimurje dialects have often specific vowels, as in put above, where u is actually a vowel between o and u, and I tried to use a special letter for it. The verb kušnuti (kušne) kiss comes from German küssen, and cug is German Zug, i.e. train.

Here’s one performance from YouTube:

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