Radioclare wrote:Daniel N. wrote:In most series, the dialect is watered down. It's almost impossible you'll hear anything too dialectal in anything set in Slavonia, as such dialects are restricted to only few small villages there today. The stress is a so complex topic in South Slavic that a Croatian linguist (the link is on the image) wrote a 1000-page book on the topic, and that is just the first part
But as a foreigner, it's actually a brilliant thing that the dialect is watered down, otherwise I wouldn't be able to understand anything at all I think watching TV series is helpful for this because it gives me a 'flavour' of what the differences are in how people speak in a particular region, whether that's slightly different words they use or a different pronunciation, so I can learn something but on the other hand I can still understand the dialogue reasonably well For example, one of the key actors in 'Larin izbor' was Ivan Herceg, who is obviously not from Split, and I have read a few articles by people from Split saying how dreadful his attempt at the accent was. But it didn't matter to me, because from his character I was still able to learn things like how people say 'sritan' instead of 'sretan' and learn new words like 'marenda' which would never be in any of my textbooks.
At the moment I am watching a series set in Dubrovnik and I have read even worse controversy about the accents of the main actors in that, with people variously accusing them of sounding as if they come from Bosnia or Montenegro, but definitely not from Dubrovnik. I am not too concerned though, because ultimately I am not watching it to learn how to imitate a Dubrovnik accent but just to hear people talking in a different way. And I have already learned some new words, like 'dundo'.In this map (I took it from the book I've mentioned), yellow areas have the final stress in words like žena and trava.
The map is incredible Stress is so complicated that it's enough to put anyone off trying to learn the language. The only positive is that next time I stress a word incorrectly, I will be able to console myself that perhaps it was actually correct in someone's dialect
I've sometimes do the same when I've spoken Czech with Slovak influence (or vice-versa) (see Eastern Moravian dialect), Slovak with Polish influence (or again vice-versa) (see Podhale dialect and Eastern Slovak dialects) or Ukrainian with Polish influence (cf. Southwestern dialects of Ukrainian - in Russian but hey it could be good practice for you to scan the list of characteristics)