Resian

Characteristics

Resian belongs to the western subgroup of the South Slavic branch of the Slavic languages, together with Slovene, which includes the Natisone Valley dialect, and Serbo-Croatian. It represents the far northwestern part of the dialect continuum. The closest written language is the Natisone Valley dialect and the closest standard language is Slovene. The closest (other) Slovene dialect is the Torre Valley dialect, another dialect known for little mutual intelligibility with other dialects. Written Resian can be understood by most Slovenes, partially also due to its similar orthography. Spoken Resian, however, is much more difficult to understand, with the main reason being centralization of vowels, making them more difficult to distinguish. Speakers of the Torre Valley and Natisone Valley dialects, as well as other dialects in Littoral dialect group, can understand spoken Resian most easily because they have the most shared features and they all have extensive vocabulary from Friulian and Italian.