The Interpretation of Substantive Declension in the Slavic Linguistic Atlas

The paper deals with The Interpretation of Substantive Declension in Slavic Languages which is based on an extensive field research of all Slavic language dialects. The territory of the research is delimited by the international project The Slavic Linguistic Atlas. It’s database is formed by the answers to more than 3400 questions within 853 localities overall the Slavic territory. However, not all the forms of substantive paradigms are presented, but only the selected representative phenomena testifying to the natural constitutive processes of the national languages in connection with the phonetic changes proving the specific character of the linguistic development under the influence of a genetically homogeneous or heterogeneous environment and testifying to linguistic changes as results of intercultural, inter-lingual and probably also inter confessional influences. The final part of the publication is oriented upon the constitutive processes of substantive declination in the Slavic macro-areas (South-Slavic, West-Slavic, and East-Slavic — and within them also in the particular Slavic languages) from the point of view of “otherness” and “foreignness”, i.e. from the point of view of the original and non-original grammatical endings in the particular declension types. The genuine basis of the transgression from the original domestic elements to the new ones gets manifested not only within the adaptation processes of the lexical level, but its basis is hidden in the long-term stabilization processes, in systemic changes by which the inner structure of the language, the area of the distribution of changes, and their impact upon the typological substance of the language are modified. By its interpretative character, the research aims at integrating the genetic areal as well as typological aspects of the investigated domain.