The Emergence of Diaspora Serbian Dialect Formation in the USA: Evidence from the Early 1900s Serbian American Newspapers

Abstract: As a part of the research project Written Cultural Heritage of the Serbian Diaspora in the USA: Serbian-American Periodicals (1900–1960) conducted in cooperation between the University of Belgrade and Wayne State University, the aim of the paper is to (re)construct the foundations of what is today a distinctive Serbian American culture and to shed more light on how contemporary dialect of Serbian, Diaspora Serbian spoken in the USA, has evolved from direct contact(s) with American English. Our research leans on the language corpus compiled of more than 100 issues of Serbian newspapers printed in Chicago and circulated among the Serbian diaspora in the Midwestern states from 1917–1920. The corpus which echoes the socio-linguistic diversity of the Serbian community in the USA at the time presents the unique evidence of the earliest stages of Diaspora Serbian dialect formation. In this paper, we try to outline the socio-lingustic properties of the Serbian language spoken by Serbian immigrants in this early stage of the new variety formation focusing on the explicit early Serbian-English language contact and the instances of modiication and accommodation of features in this language mix through speech behavior that involved a great deal of inconsistent code-switching, code-mixing(and code-blending).