Central Slovak and Kajkavian Structural Convergences: A Tentative Survey

The purpose of this tentative survey is to shed light on certain structural features that are common to the central Slovak and the Croatian kajkavian dialects. Some of these elements may be parallel developments, but there is a number of features that inevitably testify to the former existence of a continuum in the area that became largely de-Slavicized after the arrival of the Magyars, on the one hand, and the Bavarian Germans, on the other. It should be emphasized that this survey is preliminary, based on fieldwork carried out by the author, and that the features described below may also occur elsewhere. I tentatively designate the identified common isoglosses as “Pannonian.”