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The Phoneme /O/ in Opoja Albanian: Albanian-Slavic Contact and the Slavic Jers

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The Phoneme /O/ in Opoja Albanian: Albanian-Slavic Contact and the Slavic Jers Journal of Language Contact 5 (2012) 247–261 brill.com/jlc The Phoneme /o/ in Opoja Albanian: Albanian-Slavic Contact and the Slavic Jers Andrew Dombrowski University of Chicago [email protected] Abstract The phoneme /o/ is often present in the Albanian dialect of Opoja in environments where it is absent elsewhere in Albanian. This paper explains /o/ in Opoja by reference to the Slavic sub- strate present in that area of Kosovo. Language shift from Slavic to Albanian took place in the late 16th and 17th centuries in Opoja, and I argue that during this process, Slavic /o/ was identi- fied with Albanian /ə/. This identification was facilitated by the fact that the Slavic dialect of Opoja lay directly on a major isogloss of a crucial sound change in Slavic: the loss of hyper-short high vowels, also known as the jer shift. To the south of Opoja, the Slavic dialect of Gora has /o/ and /e/ from these hyper-short high vowels (known as jers in the Slavic literature), but to the north, the dialect of Prizren shifted both vowels to /ə/. This allowed Albanian /ə/ to be identified with the Slavic jer reflexes, which were then imposed on Albanian during the process of language shift. Keywords Albanian; Slavic; historical linguistics; contact linguistics; language shift 1. Introduction The Albanian dialect of Opoja, spoken in far southwestern Kosovo between Gora and Sretečka Župa, is unique among Albanian dialects due to the wide- spread presence of /o/ in certain environments where it is absent in other dialects of Albanian, as described in Pajaziti (2005). After presenting sociohis- torical background information about Opoja, I review all of the environments where /o/ occurs uniquely in the Opoja dialect, and argue that the presence of /o/ in Opoja is due to a sound change from /ə/ to /o/. I furthermore argue that this sound change was influenced by the Slavic jer shift, in which hyper-short front and back high vowels, known as jers in the Slavic linguistics literature, were either lost or shifted to full vowels. In particular, I argue that the sound change from /ə/ to /o/ was caused by the imposition of Slavic jer reflexes dur- ing the process of language shift from Slavic to Albanian, which likely took © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI 10.1163/187740912X639229 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 06:26:12PM via free access 248 A. Dombrowski / Journal of Language Contact 5 (2012) 247–261 place in the late 16th and 17th centuries. Finally, I consider the question of what information can be reconstructed about the now-extinct Slavic dialect of Opoja, and hypothesize that the Slavic dialect of Opoja may have been a one- jer dialect of a hitherto unattested type in Slavic, in which both jers shifted to /o/ - i.e., a unique transition zone between Serbian (in which both jers shifted to /ə/) and Macedonian (in which the back jer shifted to /o/ and the front jer shifted to /e/). Figure 1. The eographicalG Location of Opoja and Gora (with elevation contours) Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 06:26:12PM via free access A. Dombrowski / Journal of Language Contact 5 (2012) 247–261 249 1.1. Sociohistorical background Opoja (Serbian Opolje) is located in the mountainous, historically somewhat isolated southwesternmost corner of Kosovo known as the Dragash district, which is divided between the region of Gora in the south and the region of Opoja in the north (see figure 1). Due to the cultural and historical develop- ments that have affected the Dragash region as a whole, the sociohistorical background of Opoja must be examined in the light of developments that also affected Gora. Both communities are Muslim, although widespread conver- sion to Islam in Gora took place significantly more recently than in Opoja. Currently, Slavic and Albanian are spoken in Gora, while only Albanian is spoken in Opoja.1 Aromanian toponyms give some indication of the pre- Slavic linguistic situation in these regions, but in the early Middle Ages, it appears that Slavic was spoken in both regions (Mladenović 2001: 51). Gora and Opoja are both located in high, rugged terrain, somewhat isolated from nearby areas, separated only by the river Plava (Lutovac 1956: 234, Mladenović 2001: 40). Furthermore, cultural ties bind the two regions. Lutovac states that relations between the Albanians of Opoja and the Slavic speakers of Gora have traditionally been good, even to the point of sporadic marriage ties, which is not the case for the relationship between Gorans and other neighboring Albanian groups (Lutovac 1956: 278-280). Given the commonalities between these communities, two major discrepancies between Gora and Opoja must be explained. First, why did Islam spread in Opoja centuries before the full Islamization of Gora? Second, why is Albanian spoken in Opoja while Slavic is spoken in Gora? Lutovac (1956) argues that the key difference was the presence of a wealthy Turkish landowner named Kukli-Beg in Opoja in the early 16th century. According to sources, Kukli-Beg owned 117 houses in Prizren and property elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, but, crucially, had only meager possessions in Gora (Lutovac 1956: 259). Lutovac then hypothesizes that the presence of Kukli-Beg resulted in the largely Slavic population partially converting to Islam and partially migrating elsewhere, leaving unoccupied areas into which Albanians emigrated, eventually resulting in language shift. Evidence from toponyms supports this hypothesis (Lutovac 1956: 262-263). Since the Islamization of the Albanian population was not necessarily complete by this 1 The Albanian-speaking population in oraG is likely of recent provenance, and should therefore be distinguished from the Albanian-speaking population of Opoja (Mladenović 2001: 36-38, Friedman p.c.) Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 06:26:12PM via free access 250 A. Dombrowski / Journal of Language Contact 5 (2012) 247–261 time, this account is consistent with Pulaha’s data from the registration of 1591. According to this document, “in the nahija of Opoja there were 369 Muslim heads of households and bachelors [i.e., with names that bear no indica- tion of language - AD] and 78 Christian heads of households and bachelors, the majority of whom have Albanian anthroponyms” (Pulaha 1984: 21-22). This account is also supported by Lutovac’s (1956: 273) findings that “of 72 lineages and 1032 households, 37 lineages and 578 houses are ‘immigrants’ (doseljenici) and 36 lineages and 455 households are of unknown background.” Of the immigrant lineages, 14 claim decent from the nearby Albanian border regions of Hasi / Podrimlje and Luma, while 18 claim descent from elsewhere in Albania. Notably, the lineages of ‘unknown’ background interviewed in Lutovac (1956) were not aware of belonging to a fis, the Albanian concept of clan organization known in northern Albania and Kosovo. Fis organization does not generally occur in modern-day Opoja, and late 19th-century accounts describe the inhabitants of Opoja as preserving many Serbian customs (Lutovac 1956: 277). This contrasts sharply with contemporary Gora, where newer lineages are comparatively less frequent, comprising only 358 of the 2200 households (Mladenović 2001: 42-43). The population of Gora converted to Islam much later than that of Opoja. The earliest Goran mosque dates from 1751; other mosques were built in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Islamization in Gora took place gradually; the last Christian inhabitant of Gora died in 1856, according to some sources, while a 1865 source asserts that “today there are still four brothers in Brod and their sister Mara, and two brothers are of the Turkish faith while the two other brothers and Mara are of the Serbian faith” (Mladenović 2001: 55). The most plausible direct trigger for Islamization seems to have been the neglect of the area by the Greek Orthodox religious hierarchy after the abolition of the Peć Patriarchate (Mladenović 2001: 55, Lutovac 1956: 270-271). Intercommunal relations significantly worsened in the mid-19th century, due to the emergence of language-based ideologies of nationalism and the ero- sion of centralized Ottoman power. This seems to have had direct repercus- sions for the Gora and Opoja regions. Regarding tensions between Gorans and neighboring Albanians, Mladenović states: “In the second half of the 19th century animal husbandry began to decline because the Ottoman Empire was then descending into anarchy and the Albanians from the neighboring region of Luma raided their [the Gorans'] stocks . In Gora, memory of that time is still active” (Mladenović 2001: 41). By 1916 – i.e., after the Balkan Wars and dur- ing World War I – a report from the French Ministry of War states: “The [area] of Gora is populated exclusively by Muslims who only speak Serbian and live in Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 06:26:12PM via free access A. Dombrowski / Journal of Language Contact 5 (2012) 247–261 251 constant hostility with the Albanians” (Mladenović 2001: 33). Thus, although Gora and Opoja share significant historical commonalities, they exist today as two sociologically differentiated units. As mentioned above, the Albanian dialect of Opoja is unique in having the phoneme /o/ present in a wide range of morphological environments in which /o/ does not occur elsewhere in Albanian. Interestingly, the Slavic dialect of Gora is also unique in a Slavic context, in some regards occupying a transi- tional position between the Serbian Prizren-Morava dialects to its north and the northern Macedonian dialects spoken to the south and east of Gora (Lutovac 1955: 282, Mladenović 2001; see also Friedman 2002/3: 164-165 on the history of the classification of the dialect of Gora). Taken together, then, Opoja and Gora also form a linguistic unit in the sense that the dialects of each region are unique in their broader linguistic context – i.e., Gora is in some ways a unique transitional zone in South Slavic just as Opoja is a unique dialect of Albanian.
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