Torlak dialects
group of South Slavic dialects
Torlak is a group of transitional South Slavic dialects spoken across southeastern Serbia, southern and eastern Kosovo, northern North Macedonia, and northwestern Bulgaria. Torlak, together with Bulgarian and Macedonian, falls into the Balkan Slavic linguistic area, which is part of the broader Balkan sprachbund.
Torlak is not standardized, and its subdialects vary significantly in some features. Serbian linguists traditionally classified it as an old Shtokavian dialect or as a fourth supradialect of Serbo-Croatian along with Shtokavian, Chakavian, and Kajkavian. Bulgarian scholars classify it as a Western Bulgarian dialect, in which case it is referred to as a Transitional Bulgarian dialect. According to UNESCO's list of endangered languages, Torlak is a vulnerable distinct language.
In Bulgarian common speech, the Torlak dialects are traditionally referred to as U-dialects (Bulgarian: У-говори), referencing their reflex of old Slavic *ǫ being /u/ (compared to standard Bulgarian, where it is /ɤ/, or its nearby dialects, where it is /a/).
The Serbo-Croatian linguists maintain that Torlak is a Balkanized Western South Slavic dialect together with the South Slavic varieties spoken in northern parts of North Macedonia and in Western Bulgaria (Vuković 2021). Other researchers tend to classify it as Eastern South Slavic. Motoki Nomachi maintains that the Torlak dialects are foreign to standard Serbian in many cases.
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