ABSTRACT

This paper critically examines the construction of ‘supradialects’ (BCMS narječje) in Central South Slavic (CSS) dialectology. The concept is unique because it is usually placed in the hierarchy of varieties above ‘dialect’ and below ‘language’, also because supradialects are indicated as the ‘dialectal bases’ of Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian (BCMS) languages (and their predecessor, Serbo-Croatian). Despite that, the definition of supradialects in CSS literature is paradoxical: they are not fully described varieties, but sets of old isoglosses, reconstructed by dialectologists by comparing remote village speech varieties to *proto-Slavic. This poses the question of how they can act as a “base” of a contemporary standard language. To explore this issue, I analyse the CSS dialectological literature of the past two centuries and inspect the metalanguage used to define and construct supradialects. I also illustrate how the use of the “base” metaphor in authoritative publications on BCMS languages creates an understanding of supradialects as homogenous, contemporary varieties, concealing their (re)constructed nature. Theoretically, the paper offers and alternative perspective on dialects as discursive constructs in their own terms rather than by-products of linguistic standardization, as they are most often treated in sociolinguistics.

摘要

本文批判性地研究了“超方言”（BCMS narječje) 在中南斯拉夫 (CSS) 方言中。这个概念是独一无二的，因为它通常位于“方言”之上和“语言”之下的变体层次结构中，还因为超方言被表示为波斯尼亚语、克罗地亚语、黑山语和塞尔维亚语 (BCMS) 语言（及其前身，塞尔维亚克罗地亚人）。尽管如此，CSS 文献中对超方言的定义是自相矛盾的：它们不是完全描述的变体，而是由方言学家通过将偏远的乡村语音变体与 *proto-Slavic 进行比较来重建的旧等语词组。这就提出了一个问题，即它们如何充当当代标准语言的“基础”。为了探讨这个问题，我分析了过去两个世纪的 CSS 方言学文献，并检查了用于定义和构建超方言的元语言。我还说明了如何在有关 BCMS 语言的权威出版物中使用“基础”隐喻，从而将超方言理解为同质的当代变体，隐藏它们（重新）构建的性质。从理论上讲，该论文提供了另一种观点，即方言作为其自身术语中的话语结构，而不是语言标准化的副产品，因为它们在社会语言学中最常被处理。