Torlakian dialects

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Torlakian
Native to	Serbia, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Romania
Ethnicity	Serbs, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Krashovani, Gorani
Native speakers	(undated figure of ca. 1.5 million)[1]
Language family	Indo-European Balto-Slavic Slavic South Slavic Eastern Torlakian
Writing system	Cyrillic Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Linguist List	srp-tor
Glottolog	nort2595  Macedonian (partial match) piri1234  Pirin-Malashevo tran1292  Transitional Bulgarian
Areas where Torlakian dialects are spoken.
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Torlakian, or Torlak, is a group of transitional South Slavic dialects of southeastern Serbia, Kosovo, northeastern 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. According to UNESCO's list of endangered languages, Torlakian is vulnerable.^[1]

Torlakian is not standardized, and its subdialects vary significantly in some features. Yugoslav linguists traditionally classified it as an old Shtokavian dialect or as a fourth dialect 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.

In Bulgarian common speech, the Torlakian dialects are traditionally referred to as У-говори ("U-dialects"), 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/).

Torlakian is a Balkanized Western South Slavic dialect: The Serbo-Croatian continuum is represented by (a) the strongly Balkanized Prizren-Timok varieties spoken in Eastern Kosovo, Eastern and Southern Serbia (they make part of the so-called Torlak dialect area together with the South Slavic varieties spoken in northern parts of North Macedonia and in Western Bulgaria (Vuković 2021), and we refer to them as “Torlak” in the text); although some researchers tend to classify it as Eastern South Slavic.^[2] According to 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.^[3] 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.^[4]

Speakers of the dialectal group are primarily ethnic Serbs, Bulgarians, and Macedonians.^[5] There are also smaller ethnic communities of Croats (the Krashovani) in Romania and Slavic Muslims (the Gorani) in southern Kosovo.