The Mežica dialect ( sl, mežiško narečje, ''mežiščina'') is a Slovene dialect in the

Carinthian dialect group The Carinthian dialect group (''koroška narečna skupina'', ''koroščina''Logar, Tine. 1996. ''Dialektološke in jezikovnozgodovinske razprave''. Ljubljana: SAZU.) is a group of closely related dialects of Slovene, a South Slavic language. T ...

. It is spoken in the triangle bounded by

Črna na Koroškem Črna na Koroškem (; german: Schwarzenbach) is a town in northern Slovenia. It is the seat of the Municipality of Črna na Koroškem. It lies in the traditional Slovenian province of Carinthia, close to the border with Austria. Since 2005 it has ...

Dravograd Dravograd (; german: Unterdrauburg) is a small town in northern Slovenia, close to the border with Austria. It is the seat of the Municipality of Dravograd. It lies on the Drava River at the confluence with the Meža and the Mislinja. It is ...

, and Mislinja. Major settlements in the dialect area are Slovenj Gradec,

Ravne na Koroškem Ravne na Koroškem (; until 1952: ''Guštanj''; german: Gutenstein in Kärnten) is a town in northern Slovenia. It is the seat of the Municipality of Ravne na Koroškem, and the largest town and the capital of Slovenia's Carinthia region. The tow ...

Prevalje Prevalje (; German: ''Prävali'') is a settlement in northern Slovenia. It is the seat of the Municipality of Prevalje. It lies in the traditional Slovenian province of Carinthia. Prevalje lies in a valley where the Meža River emerges from a na ...

, and

Mežica Mežica (; German: ''Mießdorf'') is a town in northern Slovenia. It is the seat of the Municipality of Mežica. It lies on the Meža River in the traditional Slovenian province of Carinthia) near the Austrian border. The town developed close to ...

.Toporišič, Jože. 1992. ''Enciklopedija slovenskega jezika''. Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba, p. 107.

Phonological and morphological characteristics

The Mežica 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 has a large ratio between the length of accented and unaccented vowels. Mid

vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...

s tend to become open (e.g., ''e'' > ''ε'') but there is also some diphthong development (e.g., ''ě'' > ''ie'', ''o'' > ''uo''). The dialect underwent the Slovenian third accentual retraction, the feminine nominal instrumental singular ending is ''-oj'', and the addition of ''š-'' before

deictics In linguistics, deixis (, ) is the use of general words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context, e.g., the words ''tomorrow'', ''there'', and ''they''. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their de ...

in ''t-'' (e.g., ''štam'' for ''tam'' 'there'; known as ''štekanje'' in Slovene) is typical.

References

Slovene dialects {{Slavic-lang-stub