Orahovac Town Community: Language, History, Self-Identitfication

Abstract

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of the (socio)linguistic situation in the town of Orahovac, Western Kosovo. The situation involves interaction of the local Gheg dialect of the Albanian language, the literary Albanian language, the literary Serbian language, the local Torlak dialect, and the special Slavic idiom of the Albanian population, known as ravački ‘the dialect of Orahovac’. An attempt is made to give a linguistic description of the local idiom, using the materials previously published by other researchers and the own field data. The ethnic awareness of the inhabitants of Orahovac is considered and hypotheses about the ways of its formation are proposed.