Specific features of Standard Serbian in the Republic of Srpska

The aim of the study is to describe and analyse the characteristic features of the Standard Serbian variety spoken in the west of the Republic of Srpska. Under analysis are records of spontaneous speech by educated speakers of Standard Serbian who have previously lived or currently live in Banja Luka, as well as lexical questionnaires filled out by educated residents of different towns of the Republic of Srpska. Aside from the “iekavian” orthoepic norm setting it apart from the Serbian spoken in Serbia, the Standard Serbian of the Republic of Srpska has other specific features, both at the normative and at the substandard level. The western Serbian regions of the country preserve the older prosodic norm to a higher degree than Serbia, including the four types of stress, post-stress long vowels and stress shifting to the proclitic (preposition). At the same time, under dialectal influence, vowel reduction is becoming widespread in the speech of educated Serbian speakers. At the morphological level, the local idiom retains formation of collective numerals with the suffix -ero as well as some features of nominal declension. The syntax is characterized by a wider use of the infinitive in comparison to the da -construction that predominates in the eastern Serbian language area and by a complete absence of the da-construction in the future tense. At the lexical level, a number of regional lexemes are officially recognized as Standard Serbian. Given that the frequency of common standard Serbian lexis in speech in the area is about the same as that of regionalisms, the standard Serbian of the Republic of Srpska may be characterised as an idiom with lexical duality. Regionalisms are more frequent in the western regions of the Republic of Srpska compared to the eastern areas of the country. The general conclusion is that the Standard Serbian of the Western Serbian areas shows more archaic features compared to the Balkanised version used in Serbia.