The Haloze dialect (, ''haloščina'') is a
Slovene dialect in the
Pannonian dialect group
The Pannonian dialect group (''panonska narečna skupina''), or northeastern dialect group, is a group of closely related dialects of Slovene language, Slovene. The Pannonian dialects are spoken in northeastern Slovenia (Prekmurje, in the eastern ...
. It is spoken in the
Haloze Hills south of the line defined by the
Dravinja and
Drava
The Drava or Drave (, ; ; ; ; ), historically known as the Dravis or Dravus, is a river in southern Central Europe. rivers, extending to the Croatian border, bounded on the west by a line running from southeast of
Majšperk to
Donačka Gora and the
Macelj border crossing. Larger settlements in the dialect area include
Podlehnik,
Žetale, and
Gradišče.
[Toporišič, Jože. 1992. ''Enciklopedija slovenskega jezika''. Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba, p. 56.]
Phonological and morphological characteristics
The Haloze dialect lacks
pitch accent
A pitch-accent language is a type of language that, when spoken, has certain syllables in words or morphemes that are prominent, as indicated by a distinct contrasting pitch (music), pitch (tone (linguistics), linguistic tone) rather than by vol ...
and is characterized by the phonological development of hard ''ł'' > ''o''. The adjectival declension has ''o'' instead of standard ''e'' (e.g., ''-oga'' instead of ''-ega''). The cluster ''šč'' is preserved in the dialect and the ending ''-do'' is frequent in third-person plural verb forms.
References
Slovene dialects
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