Transitional Bulgarian Dialects - Grammatical and Morphological Characteristics

Grammatical and Morphological Characteristics

• Definiteness realised with post-positive articles (as in Bulgarian). The definite articles are usually -ът, -та, -то, -те as in Standard Bulgarian
• Break-up of the Old Bulgarian case system (as in Bulgarian). Apart from the nominal forms, there is an agglomerative form only for masculine animate names and feminine names
• Loss of the infinitive (as in Bulgarian)
• Full retention of the aorist and the imperfect (as in Bulgarian)
• Doubling of objects with an additional object pronoun (as in Bulgarian)
• Ending -e for plural of feminine nouns and adjectives (as in Serbian): жене (women)
• The plural endings of adjectives vary from three (for each gender, as in Serbian), to two (one for masculine and neuter and one for feminine) and one (as in Bulgarian), depending on dialect/subdialect
• Ending -мо for 1st person pl. present time (as in Serbian): носимо (we carry)
• Ending -ше for 3rd person pl. past tense (vs. -ха in Bulgarian): плетоше equal to Serbian impefect tense, vs. Standard Bulgarian плетоха (they knitted)

For the phonological and morphological characteristics of the individual dialects included in the dialectal group, cf. individual articles.