The Unattainable Standard — Zagreb Dialect Meets Standard Croatian Accentuation

Abstract

The paper discusses the accentual accommodation by speakers of the urban dialect 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 settings — 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 accentuation, so they only approximate it by inconsistently changing the place of stress. The level of accommodation varies among speakers. The prescribed Croatian standard accentuation is different than in languages like English, because it cannot be acquired fully by many speakers due mainly to reasons of phonetic complexity. The basics of the Zagreb dialect accentuation and its complex relation to the standard language accentuation (due to many innovations in the dialect and a range of conservative and innovative varieties) are also analyzed. This paper is the first to describe the phenomenon in detail, based on concrete data.

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