The Mežica dialect is a Slovene dialect in the Carinthian dialect group

Carinthian dialect group

The Carinthian dialect group is a group of closely related dialects of Slovene. The Carinthian dialects are spoken by Carinthian Slovenes in Austria, in Slovenian Carinthia, and in the northwestern parts of Slovenian Styria along the upper Drava Valley, and in the westernmost areas of Upper...

. It is spoken in the triangle bounded by Črna na Koroškem

Crna na Koroškem

Črna na Koroškem is a town and a municipality in northern Slovenia. It lies at the confluence of the Meža River with its tributary Javorski potok in the traditional Slovenian province of Carinthia. The German name Schwarzenbach means 'black creek'....

, Dravograd

Dravograd

Dravograd is a small town and a municipality in northern Slovenia, close to the border with Austria. It lies on the Drava River at the confluence with the Meža and the Mislinja. It is part of the traditional Slovenian province of Carinthia)....

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

Slovenj Gradec

Slovenj Gradec is a town and a municipality in northern Slovenia. It is part of the historic Lower Styria region, since 2005 it belongs to the NUTS-3 statistical region of Carinthia...

, Ravne na Koroškem

Ravne na Koroškem

Ravne na Koroškem is a town and a municipality in northern Slovenia. Until 1918, the town was part of the Duchy of Carinthia. It is the largest town in the traditional Slovenian province of Carinthia and its capital. Its Slovene name means 'Ravne in Carinthia', in order to distinguish it from...

, Prevalje

Prevalje

Prevalje is a settlement and a municipality in northern Slovenia. It lies in the traditional Slovenian province of Carinthia. On 1 January 1999 Prevalje became an independent municipality. Prevalje lies in a valley where the Meža River emerges from a narrow gorge, full of fluvioglacial sediments...

, and Mežica

Mežica

Mežica is a town and a municipality in northern Slovenia. It lies on the Meža River in the traditional Slovenian province of Carinthia) near the Austrian border. The town developed close to a lead and zinc mine under Mount Peca. Mining began in 1665 and ended in 1994...

.

Phonological and morphological characteristics

The Mežica dialect lacks pitch accent

Pitch accent

Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words...

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

Vowel

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...

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

Deixis

In linguistics, deixis refers to the phenomenon wherein understanding the meaning of certain words and phrases in an utterance requires contextual information. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denotational meaning varies depending on time and/or place...

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