Torlakian dialects

Torlakian, or Torlak, is a group of transitional South Slavic dialects spoken across southeastern Serbia, southern and eastern Kosovo, northern North Macedonia, and northwestern Bulgaria. Torlakian, together with Bulgarian and Macedonian, falls into the Balkan Slavic linguistic area, which is part of the broader Balkan sprachbund.

Torlakian is not standardized, and its subdialects vary significantly in some features. Serbian linguists traditionally classified it as an old Shtokavian dialect or as a fourth supradialect of Serbo-Croatian along with Shtokavian, Chakavian, and Kajkavian. Bulgarian scholars classify it as a Western Bulgarian dialect, in which case it is referred to as a Transitional Bulgarian dialect. According to UNESCO's list of endangered languages, Torlakian is a vulnerable distinct language.

In Bulgarian common speech, the Torlakian dialects are traditionally referred to as U-dialects (Bulgarian: У-говори), referencing their reflex of old Slavic *ǫ being /u/ (compared to standard Bulgarian, where it is /ɤ/, or its nearby dialects, where it is /a/).

The Serbo-Croatian linguists maintain that Torlakian is a Balkanized Western South Slavic dialect together with the South Slavic varieties spoken in northern parts of North Macedonia and in Western Bulgaria (Vuković 2021). Other researchers tend to classify it as Eastern South Slavic. Motoki Nomachi maintains that the Torlakian dialects are foreign to standard Serbian in many cases. According to the historian Ivo Banac, during the Middle Ages, Torlak and the Eastern Herzegovinian dialect were part of Eastern South Slavic, but since the 12th century, especially the Shtokavian dialects, including Eastern Herzegovinian, began to diverge from the other neighboring South Slavic dialects.

Some of the phenomena that distinguish western and eastern subgroups of the South Slavic languages can be explained by two separate migratory waves of different Slavic tribal groups of the future South Slavs via two routes: the west and east of the Carpathian Mountains.

Speakers of the dialectal group are primarily ethnic Serbs, Bulgarians, and Macedonians. There are also smaller ethnic communities of Croats (the Krashovani in Romania, Janjevci in Kosovo) and Slavic Muslims (the Gorani and Bosniaks) in southern Kosovo.

The Torlaks have been distinguished from other South Slavic languages since at least the 16th century and their dialects form an intermediate between the Eastern and Western branches of South Slavic dialect continuum, and have been variously described, in whole or in parts, as belonging to either group. In the 19th century, they were often called Bulgarian, but their classification was contested between Serbian and Bulgarian writers. Previously, the designation "Torlakian" was not applied to the dialects of Niš and the neighbouring areas to the east and south.

The Torlakian dialects, together with Bulgarian and Macedonian, display many properties of the Balkan linguistic area, a set of structural convergence features shared also with other, non-Slavic, languages of the Balkans such as Albanian, Romanian and Aromanian. In terms of areal linguistics, they have therefore been described as part of a prototypical "Balkan Slavic" area, as opposed to other parts of Serbo-Croatian, which are only peripherally involved in the convergence area. The Dutch linguist Willem Vermeer describes Torlakian as a creole language influenced by Albanian and Romanian.