Introduction

Introduction 1 Prekmurje Slovene among the Slavic languages There is reason to think of Prekmurje Slovene as a dialect of Slovene as well as a separate language. Indeed it has carried through many of the innovations that are characteristic of Slovene, shares most core vocabulary and grammatical structure, and from this perspective is part of a broader dialect group of the Pannonian group of Slovene dialects, together with the Slovenske gorice, Prlekija, and Haloze dialects, which in turn share a number of characteristics that differ from the rest of Slovene as well as neighboring Kajkavian dialects in Croatia (see Ramovš 1935, 171–193 for details). In favor of Prekmurje Slovene as a language1 is its written tradition, as it has been used for several centuries in a loosely standardized form, largely, but not exclusively, as a liturgical language. From a diachronic perspective, the Prekmurje dialect offers a glimpse at a linguistic code that came into being through heterogeneous processes. As pertains to all of South Slavic, its population migrated westward from the core Slavic area in today’s Ukraine in the second half of the first millennium AD. The founder population of Prekmurje Slovene (together with the Pannonian dialects) spoke a variety of Slavic that was already structurally different from that spoken in its neighboring areas to the west in today’s Slovenia as well as to the south in the Kajkavian-speaking region of Croatia. The affinity of the founder population is no longer fully recoverable, but some intriguing evidence pointing to this possibility may be found in today’s central Russia and central Bulgaria (Schallert and Greenberg 2007). As the speech community integrated with neighboring Slavic speakers, features of the language moved in the direc- tion of the dialects north of the Sava, in particular the Carinthian dialect group, and were part of a dialect continuum reaching today’s West Slavic branch, as seen, for example, in the “South Slavic” features in Central Slovak dialects (see Greenberg 2000, 35–50; Greenberg 2006). As the continuum between West and South Slavic disintegrated with the shift towards non-Slavic languages (German, Hungarian), Prekmurje Slovene was affected by contact with Ger- man and Hungarian dialects, contact that continues—especially with regard 1 I use the phrase “separate language” to refer to a degree of structural divergence as well as cultural autonomy, not a separate language as a proxy for a state. Aside from the annexation of the territory by the Hungarian authorities during the Second World War, there have not been significant separatist impulses from within the region. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004419148_002 2 introduction to Hungarian in the variety of Prekmurje Slovene spoken in Hungary proper, the Porabje region—to the present. The Prekmurje Slovene dialect traces its written tradition to the Reforma- tion in the late sixteenth century (the first milestone being the lost Agenda vandalica of 1587 [Šebjanič 1977]) with the first major extant publication being Franc Temlin’s Mali katechizmus (1715). Literacy in the region probably dates to the late 16th century with the introduction of a Protestant school under István Bánffy of Upper Lendava (Jesenšek 1998, 121). A signal achievement is Protes- tant pastor Števan Küzmič’s 1771 publication of Nouvi zákon. Both works refer to the language in which there are written as szlovenszki jeziks. The first attempt to standardize the language in a modern sense and cre- ate what is, in effect, a descriptive grammar of it took place under highly charged political circumstances during the Second World War at a time when the Slovene national language project had been nearly completed. Because the Hungarian ethnolinguistic engineering project failed during the War, the grammar—Avgust Pavel’s Prekmurje Grammar (Vend nyelvtan), completed in 1942—remained unpublished. Nevertheless, the Vend nyelvtan (hereafter VN) continues to be a unique and important resource on the grammatical structure of the Prekmurje dialect and, consequently, of comparative material for Slavic studies (Greenberg 1989, 2009). A thumbnail sketch of some of the peculiarities of Prekmurje Slovene gives some idea of the ways in which it is a unique variety of (South) Slavic: the dialect uses a reflex of the word *gъlčěti as its neutral term for ‘to speak’, which sheds light on one the darkest periods of Slavic prehistory, during the time of the migration to and settlement of the South Slavs in the Balkans and the sub-Alpine region. This fact connects pockets of innovation in central Russian, as well as mountain Bulgarian dialects, with Prekmurje Slovene, pointing in some detail the routes of the founder populations in the Slavic migrations to south-eastern Europe. Phonological and accentual developments illuminate later periods that demonstrate the gradual integration of disparate and heterogeneous speech communities (§281; see Schallert and Greenberg 2007 for details). Some instances, such as the lengthening of the e-presents of the c- paradigm verbs demonstrate innovations carried through in central Slovak, Carinthian, and Prekmurje Slovene, most likely belong to that stage of devel- opment in which a Slavic speech community continued across the Pannonian Basin before the arrival of the Hungarians (§262; Greenberg 1993, 467). Later, but still early developments show that early stages of Carinthian and Pannon- ian Slovene, as well as Kajkavian, formed a dialect continuum with the interplay of archaisms and innovations resulting in interlocking sets of outcomes in the vowel systems, depending on the relative chronology of the waves of innova-.

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