engleski

The Unattainable Standard – Zagreb Dialect Meets Standard Croatian Accentuation

The paper discusses the accentual accommodation by speakers of the urban dia lect of Zagreb (the capital of Croatia), which has a dynamic free accent, to the Standard Croatian (Neo- Štokavian) pitch accent (with rising and falling tones). The accommodation occurs in formal sett ings—the basis of this research is the corpus of 16 one-hour interviews with native Zagreb dialect speakers (8 male, 8 female) from a TV show on Croatian national television (HRT). The Zagreb dialect speakers cannot fully reproduce the prescribed standard ac centua tion, so they only approximate it by inconsistently changing the place of stress. The level of accommodation varies among speakers. The prescribed Cro a tian standard accentuation is diff erent than in languages like English, because it cannot be acquired fully by many speakers due mainly to reasons of pho netic complexity. The basics of the Zagreb dialect accentuation and its complex relation to the standard language accentuation (due to many in no va tions in the dialect and a range of conservative and innovative varieties) are also analyzed. This paper is the fi rst to describe the phenomenon in detail, based on concrete data.

Zagreb dialect ; Croatian ; accent ; accentuation ; standard language ; accommodation

nije evidentirano