Past Tense Forms in the Macedonian Resettlement Idiom of Vojvodina (Serbia)

Abstract

The article examines the features of the past tense system in Macedonian resettlement dialects of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, Serbia, based on a corpus of texts collected during a 2023 linguistic expedition to the villages of Jabuka, Kačarevo, Glogonj, Plandište, and Belgrade. The first section provides a sociolinguistic overview of the formation of the Macedonian minority in Vojvodina during the Agrarian Reform of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia of 1945‒1948. The second section describes the corpus of oral interviews collected during the 2023 expedition. The third section compares the past tense systems of literary Macedonian and Serbian, highlighting the structurally similar but functionally distinct synthetic forms of the aorist and imperfect, as well as the perfect l-form with the present tense copula “to be”. The fourth section analyzes the linguistic material from interviews with informants from the Macedonian minority. The use of past tense forms in the Macedonian resettlement idiom is shaped by two key factors: the intense language contact with Serbian speakers and the high degree of similarity (isomorphism) in the grammatical systems of Serbian and Macedonian. This study focuses on the semantically versatile l-form (the "first" perfect, formed with the present tense copula “to be” and the l-participle), which, in the resettlement dialect, preserves most of its original functions from literary Macedonian: it marks evidentiality and expresses core perfect meanings, such as general factual and resultative aspects. We also observe the active use of the “second” perfect, formed with the copula ima and the n/t-participle neuter singular (the habere-perfect). Importantly, these forms are not being replaced by the "first" perfect (with the copula “to be”) to express resultative meaning, even though Serbian, the surrounding language, favors the latter construction. The fifth section analyzes instances of code-mixing, where Macedonian speakers use the l-form perfect in their speech with the same function as the Serbian perfect – to express narrative past events.

Funding

This research was supported by the Russian Science Foundation (RSF) project No. 20-78-10030, «The language and cultural contact during the social transformations among the national minorities in Alpine-Pannonian region».

Received 12 May 2025

Revised 19 October 2025

Accepted 2 November 2025

For citation: Muravleva, N. I., 2025. Past Tense Forms in the Macedonian Resettlement Idiom of Vojvodina (Serbia). Slavic World in the Third Millennium, 20 (3–4), pp. 144–172. https://doi.org/10.31168/2412-6446.2025.20.3-4.07