The Haloze dialect ( sl, haloško narečje, ''haloščina'') is a
Slovene dialect in the
Pannonian dialect group. It is spoken in the
Haloze Hills south of the line defined by the
Dravinja and
rivers, extending to the Croatian border, bounded on the west by a line running from southeast of
Majšperk
Majšperk (, in older sources ''Majšperg'', german: Monsberg) is a settlement in the Municipality of Majšperk in northeastern Slovenia. It is the seat of the municipality. The area is part of the traditional region of Styria. The municipality i ...
to
Donačka Gora
Donačka Gora (; german: Donatiberg) is a settlement east of the town of Rogatec in eastern Slovenia. It lies south of a hill with the same name. The area traditionally belonged to the Styria region and is now included in the Savinja Statistica ...
and the
Macelj
Macelj (; ) is the name of a village and a forest in northern Croatia bordering on Slovenia. There is an official border crossing in Macelj, and the end of the A2 highway. The villages are administratively divided into Gornji Macelj (''Upper''), p ...
border crossing. Larger settlements in the dialect area include
Podlehnik
Podlehnik (; german: Lichtenegg) is a settlement in the Haloze Hills in eastern Slovenia. It is the seat of the Municipality of Podlehnik. The area traditionally belonged to the region of Styria. It is now included in the Drava Statistical Regi ...
,
Žetale
Žetale () is a village in eastern Slovenia, on the border with Croatia. It is the seat of the Municipality of Žetale. The area traditionally belonged to the region of Styria. It is now included in the Drava Statistical Region.
History
Žetale ...
, and
Gradišče.
[Toporišič, Jože. 1992. ''Enciklopedija slovenskega jezika''. Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba, p. 56.]
Phonological and morphological characteristics
The Haloze dialect lacks
pitch accent
A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness ( ...
and is characterized by the phonological development of hard ''ł'' > ''o''. The adjectival declension has ''o'' instead of standard ''e'' (e.g., ''-oga'' instead of ''-ega''). The cluster ''šč'' is preserved in the dialect and the ending ''-do'' is frequent in third-person plural verb forms.
References
Slovene dialects
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