The Slovene Dialect of Egg and Potschach in the Gailtal, Austria

Book excerpt: Slovene is one of the most dialectally diverse languages of Europe, consisting of 37 dialects. This book gives a detailed description of one of the most archaic dialects of Slovene: the dialect spoken in the Gail Valley (Gailtal) in the Austrian state of Carinthia (Karnten). The Gailtal dialect is part of the Slovene minority language in Austria and is spoken by an ever decreasing number of speakers. The volume at hand describes the phonology, morphophonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon of the dialect. A separate chapter is devoted to the preservation and development of the common Slavic pitch accent in the Gailtal dialect and in Slovene in general. The book will be of interest to scholars in Slavic linguistics, language contact, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and typology. Tijmen Pronk, PhD, is postdoc at Leiden University and specializes in South Slavic dialectology, Balto-Slavic accentology and comparative Indo-European linguistics.