‘Balkan Hospitality Opens Doors’: Studying Dialects on the Verge of Extinction

Belgrade

Photo courtesy of Natalia Muravleva

You cannot study spoken dialects from books. Instead, you need to go to a village, seek out its elders, and earn the trust of local residents before you can record hours of spontaneous stories. This is how Natalia Muravleva, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, conducts her research. Her internship in Serbia continued her long-standing study of dialects spoken by Macedonian settlers. In this interview, she discusses how diaspora cultural centres help researchers reach informants, why native speakers need to be interviewed only in their own language (otherwise, as she puts it, they may 'break'), and how a single field season helped her finalise her monograph. She also shares warm memories of autumn in Belgrade and of colleagues with whom grammar can be discussed in three languages at once.

This article is part of a series of publications highlighting the outcomes of long-term academic internships.

Natalia Muravleva

— Your internship focused on collecting field data for a monograph, and you studied Macedonian dialects in Serbia. How does data collected in the field differ from what can be found in dictionaries and grammars? Have you encountered cases where native speakers used irrealis constructions in ways that are not described in any textbook?

— Together with colleagues from the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, I went on a field expedition to Serbia in 2023. It was then that we first encountered the diverse Macedonian community living in Vojvodina near Belgrade. Vojvodina is a Serbian region with a rich history of migration and is now home to more than 15 ethnic minorities, including Hungarians, Romanians, Slovaks, Czechs, and others. The Macedonian minority is one of the smallest and, in a sense, the youngest. Its settlement in the region is linked to the colonisation process carried out as part of the 1945–1948 agrarian reform. After the Second World War, the authorities redistributed land following confiscations and expropriations, including property belonging to the German population, which had constituted a large part of the region’s economically prosperous community before the war. The fertile land needed to be quickly brought back into productive use, so people from different republics of Yugoslavia began to be resettled there, including war veterans, partisan families, and landless peasants. Each republic was assigned a resettlement quota. As a result, between 1945 and 1948, the first Macedonian settler families moved to Vojvodina, establishing themselves in three villages: Jabuka, Kačharevo , and Glogonj. It is precisely this compact settlement pattern that makes the community particularly interesting to researchers.

Why is this background important? The Macedonian language was codified shortly after the Second World War, in 1945, and the spread of literary norms did not happen overnight. In fact, the Macedonian colonists who arrived in Vojvodina from different parts of the republic spoke only their native dialects, and it was their family language that was passed down from one generation to the next. In the early years, although there was a Macedonian-language school where children could learn about the new literary norm, the locals we interviewed said that parents preferred to send their children to Serbian-language schools, as Serbian was considered the more prestigious language. The settlers’ dialect was therefore shaped by several factors at once: the different Macedonian dialects spoken within the same compact community, Serbian as the majority language, and the emerging literary Macedonian, which gradually became more established. Additionally, the settlers’ descendants were exposed to literary Macedonian through regular visits to relatives in Macedonia, if such trips were part of their family life.

Serbian and Macedonian are closely related languages, yet despite a similar lexicon, they have quite different grammar, both of the noun (Serbian has a case system, Macedonian, an analytical language, does not) and the verb

Our interviews found not only code switching at the lexical level (for example, all agricultural products are named in Serbian in spontaneous speech), but also changes in sentence structure and grammatical forms. My monograph focuses on irrealis da-constructions in literary Serbian and Macedonian.

Thanks to the expedition and internship organised by HSE University, I will be able to supplement my monograph with new material from the settlers’ dialect, where the two languages—Serbian and Macedonian—come into close contact in a setting that was, in essence, artificially created.

— Macedonian dialects in Serbia exist within a predominantly Serbian-speaking environment. Serbian is also a South Slavic language, but it has a different grammatical structure. What are the effects of this linguistic proximity? Do the languages mix—or, on the contrary, are archaic forms preserved?

— A lot depends on people’s linguistic background: whether Macedonian is spoken only by the older generation or used by the whole family in everyday communication; which language they were educated in; and whether they travel to Macedonia. But, unfortunately, the proximity of Serbian and Macedonian also contributes to the loss of Macedonian: the settlers' great-grandchildren understand the language spoken by their grandparents but no longer speak it. Within the community, Macedonians increasingly speak Serbian among themselves, while retaining distinctive Macedonian linguistic features that our Serbian colleagues are studying. Indeed, it is difficult to master the Serbian case system perfectly when your native language has no cases. Hence, interference and code-switching are ubiquitous features in the speech of the Macedonian diaspora. Communicative elements are typically borrowed first: Serbian discourse markers and interjections, followed by vocabulary. Eventually, sentence structure may also be modelled on Serbian, including the Wackernagel rule, whereby clitics are positioned adjacent to the first stressed word in the syntagma. Grammar is the most stable element of the system, and most constructions still follow Macedonian models. Even here, however, change is likely to occur because the two grammatical systems share certain features, as in the case of the future tense, and speakers are already combining these features in their dialect.

— Fieldwork in a diaspora community is always about more than linguistics; it is also about human interaction. How were you received in the resettlement communities? What language did you use to communicate with interviewees? Did you rely on intermediaries, and did you switch between Russian, Serbian, and Macedonian during the interviews? More broadly, how do locals feel about researchers from Russia?

— Finding people to interview is a process in itself, and it is best to establish initial contacts through official channels. For example, I visited cultural centres of the Macedonian minority in Serbia, introduced myself and explained my research. The heads of the centres then referred me to their colleagues, friends, and relatives in the villages. This is the crucial first step; after that, the network expands naturally, and Balkan hospitality opened most of the doors for me. I speak both Macedonian and Serbian, but, of course, we conducted the interviews in Macedonian. As soon as you say a phrase in Serbian, that’s it: as my colleagues put it, the interviewee ‘breaks' and immediately switches to the more familiar linguistic code.

It is always a pleasure to conduct fieldwork in Serbia, as Russians are treated very warmly there. By the time of my internship, I already had a network of contacts that I could build on and expand, so I encountered no particular obstacles—apart from the distances I had to travel from Belgrade

— Were you able to collect all the missing data, and which section of the monograph benefited most from this fieldwork?

— My main focus was on non-factive predicates with the da-particle for the purposes of my monograph. However, when conducting interviews, you inevitably notice many other phenomena related more broadly to changes in the verb system. For example, in Macedonian, evidentiality is grammaticalised: when you talk about an event, particularly one in the past, you must use a verb form that indicates whether you witnessed or otherwise directly experienced it yourself or learned about it from someone else. In Russian, we would normally express this distinction by adding words such as mol or deskat’ meaning 'they say.'

An analysis of the speech of settlers’ descendants shows that the category of evidentiality remains quite robust: they use the l-forms of verbs to mark indirect access to information, while an aorist or imperfect is used when the speaker witnessed or experienced an event in the past. The narratives I recorded focused on the history of the families’ resettlement. Naturally, many of the facts the interlocutors recounted had been passed down to them by their grandparents or learned from stories told by other colonists. The context showed that they made a meaningful distinction between information based on their own experience and information obtained from others. For example, different interlocutors often used evidential verb forms when recounting stories about colonists being assigned to houses in Vojvodina. Peasants who had previously lived in dugouts found themselves moving into manor houses confiscated from German families and felt as though they were robbers taking someone else’s home. Some even witnessed tables set, with plates of soup still steaming—evidence that the soldiers had evicted the former owners in the middle of a meal. These scenes made a deep impression on the colonists, and many of them decided to return to Macedonia, repeating: 'It’s not mine; it wasn’t my hands that built it.' If I were telling this story in Macedonian, the verbs would be marked with the evidential l-forms, since the stories had been passed down from other people rather than experienced firsthand.

— Belgrade is a city with a rich and complex history and a distinctive atmosphere. What impressed you most about the city, and how was your interaction with Serbs outside the university?

— Belgrade is the city of my student days. I have spent several extended periods there on long-term internships at the universities in Belgrade and Novi Sad, and I have a deep affection for both cities. I also love Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, where I had the opportunity to work as a visiting Russian language teacher at the university for three years.

Belgrade is currently going through challenging times amid prolonged protests. However, the Department of Slavic Studies at the University of Belgrade, which hosted me for my internship, maintains a highly productive academic atmosphere. In addition to collaborating on teaching Russian as a foreign language, which is my second area of professional interest, we discussed the material I collected on the settlers’ dialects, exchanged ideas on how to interpret particular examples, and considered which ones illustrate processes of linguistic interference and which represent instances of straightforward code-switching. At the Department of Slavic Studies, language is never an obstacle to understanding: we have more than two or three languages in common that we all actively use. Russians feel very much at home in Serbia, and Balkan hospitality has much in common with Russian hospitality. I was delighted to have the opportunity to undertake this academic internship, collect the material I was missing, discuss it with colleagues—and, of course, spend November basking in the Serbian autumn sunshine.

See the Russian version of the interview on Schola.