Natisone Valley dialect

Natisone Valley dialect
nedìško narèčje
Pronunciation	Venetian Slovenia)
Ethnicity	Slovenes
Language family	Indo-European Balto-Slavic Slavic South Slavic Western South Slavic Slovenian Littoral dialect group Natisone Valley dialect
Dialects	Western microdialects Eastern microdialects
Writing system	Latin
Official status
Recognised minority language in	Italy
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
IETF	sl-nedis
Natisone Valley dialect

The Natisone Valley dialect (Natisone Valley: nedìško narèčje;

The Natisone Valley dialect is rather uniform. The easternmost microdialects are the most different, having the phonemes /ə/ and /ʎ/, which are unknown to the other microdialects, and /m/ is sometimes used instead of /n/ at the end of a word. The biggest differences between the microdialects are the reflexes for Alpine Slovene *t’, which has almost merged with *č in the west, merging into /t͡ʃ/, with the first one usually being more palatalized. In the east, however, *t’ is still distinct and even pronounced as /t͡s/ at the end of a word.^[11]

The Natisone Valley dialect has

The three diacritics are:[3]^[13]

• The grave ( ` ) indicates a long vowel: à è ì ò ù (IPA /aː ɛː iː ɔː uː/).
• The acute ( ´ ) indicates a short vowel: á é í ó ú (IPA /a ɛ i ɔ u/).
• The
  dot above
  ( ˙ ) indicates an extra-short vowel: ȧ ė ȯ u̇ (IPA /ă ɛ̆ ɔ̆ ŭ/).

In addition, there is also the caron ( ˇ ), which indicates that a vowel can be either long or short.

The phonology of the Natisone Valley dialect is similar to that of standard Slovene. Two major exceptions are the presence of diphthongs and the existence of palatal consonants. However, the dialect is not uniform, and differences exist between eastern and western microdialects.^[11]

The Natisone Valley dialect has 24 (in the east 25) distinct phonemes, in comparison to 22 in standard Slovene. This is mostly due to the fact that it still has palatal /ɲ/, /ʎ/, and /tɕ/, which depalatalized in standard Slovene, merging with the hard consonants.^[14]

• Palatal /ʎ/ exists only in the eastern microdialects; in the western microdialects, it merged with /j/.
• The consonants /dʒ/ and /g/ are rare and only found in loanwords.
• Similarly to /l/ in standard Slovene, both /v/ and /l/ can undergo morphophonemic change into [u̯]; e.g., tràva 'grass' → tràunik 'grassland'.
• The consonant /tɕ/ has the allophone [ts] at the end of a word and [tsj] between vowels in the east. In the west, the difference between /tɕ/ and /tʃ/ is barely noticeable.

The phonology of the Natisone Valley dialect is similar to that of standard Slovene, but it has a seven-vowel^[15] (eastern microdialects eight-vowel)^[16] system; two of those are diphthongs.

The Natisone Valley dialect still has neuter gender in the singular, but it feminized in the plural. It still has the masculine and neuter o-stem declension, as well as the feminine a-stem and i-stem declension. There is also a masculine j-stem, as well as the remains of the feminine v-stem and neuter s-, t-, and n-stems. These are mostly limited to single words. However, the dialect has more archaic declension patterns that differ considerably from standard Slovene:^[17]

The infinitive has lost the final -i, but it has the same accent as the long infinitive.

Many loanwords are borrowed from

The dialect's orthography is mainly based on western microdialects. It has 26 letters; 25 of them are the same as in the Slovene alphabet, and ⟨ǧ⟩ has been added for the phoneme /dʒ/, which is written ⟨dž⟩ in Standard Slovene.

Standard orthography, used in almost all situations, uses only the letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet plus ⟨č⟩, ⟨š⟩, ⟨ž⟩, and ⟨ǧ⟩:^[19]

The orthography thus underdifferentiates several phonemic distinctions:

• Stress, vowel length, and tone are not distinguished, except with optional diacritics when it is necessary to distinguish between similar words with a different meaning.
• The consonant /g/ is not differentiated from its
  spirantized
  version, /ɣ/, and both are written as ⟨g⟩.
• The consonants /t͡ʃ/ and /t͡ɕ/ also are not differentiated, both being written as ⟨č⟩.
• The letter ⟨u⟩ is used to write syllabic /u/ as well as non-syllabic "false u" /u̯/.

The Natisone Valley dialect is unregulated, and thus a fair degree of variation is common in both pronunciation and writing. The eastern microdialects are completely unstandardized, like most other Slovene dialects. In contrast, the western microdialects have their own dictionary and grammar, written by Nino Špehonja in 2012.^[3][20] The dictionary still allows many variations in writing, and consequently pronunciation. The main reason for different spellings is akanye, which is more common in some microdialects and less in others; e.g., the word for 'bonfire' can either be written as kries or krias.