Frederik Kortlandt – Leiden University – www.kortlandt.nl FROM SERBO-CROATIAN TO INDO-EUROPEAN

The history of Slavic accentuation is complex. As a result, the significance of the Slavic accentual evidence is not immediately obvious to the average Indo-Europeanist. In this contribution I intend to render the material more easily acces-sible to the non-specialist. I shall focus on the Serbo-Croatian dialectal area, where the Proto-Slavic accentual system is better preserved than elsewhere. The main point of reference will be the neo-Štokavian system which was codified in the 19th century as a basis for the standard languages. As is well-known, the codified standard has the following properties: 1. There is either a falling tone on the initial syllable of a word or a rising tone on a non-final syllable. The rising tone resulted from the so-called neo-Štokavian retraction of the accent and points to earlier stress on the following syllable. Thus, a falling tone continues initial accent and a rising tone non-initial accent, irrespective of the Proto-Slavic tones. 2. Stressed and posttonic vowels can be either short or long. Pretonic vowels are always short. As a rule, the codified standard faithfully reflects Proto-Slavi