The Kozje-Bizeljsko dialect (''kozjansko-bizeljsko narečje''), also known as the Brežice-Kozje dialect (''brežiško-kozjansko narečje'') or the Bizeljsko-Sotla dialect (''bizeljsko-obsoteljsko narečje'') is a Slovene dialect in the Styrian dialect group. It extends north of the

Sava The Sava (; , ; sr-cyr, Сава, hu, Száva) is a river in Central and Southeast Europe, a right-bank and the longest tributary of the Danube. It flows through Slovenia, Croatia and along its border with Bosnia and Herzegovina, and finally th ...

River at

Brežice Brežice (; german: Rann ) is a town in eastern Slovenia in the Lower Sava Valley, near the Croatian border. It is the seat of the Municipality of Brežice. It lies in the center of the Brežice Plain ( sl, Brežiško polje), which is part of the ...

, ranging from

Jurklošter Jurklošter () is a settlement in the Municipality of Laško in eastern Slovenia. The area is part of the traditional region of Styria. It is now included with the rest of the municipality in the Savinja Statistical Region. Name The settlement w ...

Podčetrtek Podčetrtek ( or ; german: Windisch Landsberg) is a settlement in eastern Slovenia by the river Sotla. It is the seat of the Municipality of Podčetrtek. The area belongs to the traditional region of Styria. It is now included in the Savinja St ...

in the north, encompassing the settlements of

Kozje Kozje (, german: Drachenburg) is a small town in eastern Slovenia. It is the seat of the Municipality of Kozje. The settlement of Kozje lies in the centre of the municipality, from Celje, from Ljubljana, and from Rogaška Slatina. It is the ma ...

and

Bizeljsko Bizeljsko (; german: Wisell) is a settlement in the Municipality of Brežice in eastern Slovenia, close to the border with Croatia. It lies on the right bank of the Sotla River and in terms of its territory is the largest settlement in the Munici ...

, and to the

Sotla The Sutla ( Croatian) or Sotla ( Slovene) is a river flowing through Slovenia and Croatia, mostly forming their border. It is a tributary to the Sava, itself a tributary to the Danube. It is long and has a watershed area of . Overview The Sutla f ...

River in the east. It is the southernmost dialect in the Styrian dialect group.

Phonological and morphological characteristics

The Kozje-Bizeljsko dialect has transitional features to the Lower Carniolan dialects such as an originally preserved semivowel with a positionally conditioned ''a'' reflex of the long semivowel, and retention of

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 ( ...

. The former acute accent is bimoraic, the circumflex is monomoraic, and original quantitative distinctions between vowels have largely been replaced by qualitative differences. It is characterized by the phonemic developments ''a'' > ''ɔ'', ''u'' > ''ü'', unaccented ''u, ə,'' and

yat Yat or jat (Ѣ ѣ; italics: ) is the thirty-second letter of the old Cyrillic alphabet and the Rusyn alphabet. There is also another version of yat, the iotified yat (majuscule: , minuscule: ), which is a Cyrillic character combining a ...

> ''i'', and lowering of high vowels before ''r''.Toporišič, Jože. 1992. ''Enciklopedija slovenskega jezika''. Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba, pp. 12.

References

Slovene dialects in Styria (Slovenia) {{Slavic-lang-stub