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The Natisone Valley dialect (Natisone Valley: nedìško narèčje; nadiško narečje, nadiščina; dialetto natisoniano ) is a Slovene dialect, spoken mainly in Veneitian Slovenia, but also in a smaller part in Slovenia. It is one of the two dialects in Littoral dialect group to have its own written form, along with Resian. It is closely related to Torre Valley dialect, which has a higher degree of vowel reduction, but shares practically the same accented vowel system. It borders Torre Valley dialect to the northwest, Soča dialect to the northeast, Karst dialect to the southeast, Brda dialect to the south and Friulian to the west. The dialect belongs to the Littoral dialect group, and evolved from Veneitian-Karst dialect plane.

Classification
Natisone Valley dialect is a dialect of Slovene, an Indo-European language belonging to the Western subgroup of the South Slavic branch of the Slavic languages. It is quite different from standard Slovene though, as the standard language is based on Lower Carniolan and Upper Carniolan dialect, which formed from the southeastern proto-dialect, while Natisone Valley dialect formed from the northwestern proto-dialect and shows many similarities with other dialects in the littoral dialect group.

Despite the facts, Natisone Valley dialect and standard Slovene are easily mutually intelligible and even though the dialect has many words derived from Friulian, it can still be quite easily understood by most Slovene speakers, unlike Torre Valley dialect and Resian.

Geographic distribution
Dialect is spoken mainly in northeastern Italy, in Veneitian Slovenia. It is spoken along four rivers: Natisone/Nadiža and its three affluents, Alberone/Aborna, Cosizza/Kozica and Erbezzo/Arbeč, up to San Pietro al Natisone/Špeter Slovenov. In Slovenia, it encompasses the area west of Kolovrat, in villages like Ukanje, Kostanjevica part of Lig and villages around Livek. Bigger towns can only be found in Italy, such as San Pietro al Natisone/Špeter Slovenov, Sanguarzo/Šenčur, Purgessimo/Prešnje, San Leonardo/Podutana and Masseris/Mašere.

Further division
Natisone Valley dialect is pretty uniform. The easternmost microdialects are the most different, having sounds and, which are unknown to other microdialects and  is sometimes used instead of  at the end of a word. The biggest differences between microdialects are reflexes for Alpine Slovene *t’, which has almost merged with *č in the west, merging into, with the first one usually being more palatalized. In the east, however, *t’ is still distinct and even pronounced as at the end of a word.

Accent
The Natisone Valley dialect has pitch accent on long syllables. It also differentiates between long and short syllables, both can occur anywhere in a word. There is, however, tendency to lengthen historically short vowels. Accent is on the same syllable as in Alpine Slavic, which is different from Standard Slovene, which has undergone *ženȁ → *žèna and optionally *məglȁ → *mə̀gla shifts (e. g. NV žená, SS žéna 'wife').

Diacritics
Similarly to Standard Slovene, Natisone Valley dialect also has diacritics to denote accent. Accent is free and therefore it has to be denoted with a diacritic. There are three standard diacritics that are used, however, they do not show tonal oppositions.

The three diacritics are:

Additionally, there is also the caron ( ˇ ), which indicates a vowel can be either long or short.
 * The grave ( ` ) indicates long vowel: à è ì ò ù (IPA ).
 * The acute ( ´ ) indicates short vowel: á é í ó ú (IPA ).
 * The dot above ( ˙ ) indicates extra-short vowel: ȧ ė ȯ u̇ (IPA ).

Phonology
Phonology of Natisone Valley dialect is similar to that of Standard Slovene. Two major exceptions are presence of diphthongs and existence of palatal sounds. The dialect is not uniform, though, and differences exist between eastern and western microdialects.

Consonants
Natisone Valley dialect has 24 (in the east 25) distinct phonemes, in comparison to Standard Slovene 22. This is mostly due to the fact that it still has palatal, and , which depalatalized in Standard Slovene, merging with already hard consonants.


 * Palatal exists only in eastern microdialects, in western microdialects, it merged with.
 * Consonants and  are rare and only found in loanwords.
 * Similarly to in Standard Slovene, both  and  can morphologically conditioned turn into, e. g. tràva 'grass' → tràunik 'grassland'.
 * Consonant has an allophone  at the end of a word and  between vowels in the east. In the west, difference between  and  is barely noticeable.

Vowels
Phonology of Natisone Valley dialect is similar to that of Standard Slovene, but it has a seven vowel (eastern microdialects eight vowel ) system, two of those are diphthongs.

From evolutionary perspective
Natisone Valley dialect experienced lengthening of non-final vowels and became undistinguishable from their long counterparts, except for *ò. Vowel *ě̄ then turned into ie, and *ō into uo. Long *ə̄ turned into aː. Other long mid vowels (*ē, *ę̄, *ò, *ǭ) turned into eː and oː, respectively. Vowels *ī, *ū and *ā stayed unchanged. Syllabic *ł̥̄ turned into uː and syllabic r̥̄ turned into ar in the west and ər in the east.

Vowel reduction is almost non-existent; there is some akanye, e-akanye and ikanye, but those examples are rare. The only more common feature is loss of final -i, but even this is not the case in some more remote villages, such as Montemaggiore/Matajur and Stermizza/Strmica. Short ə turned either into a or i in the west; in the east it stayed as ə only as a fill vowel. Cluster *ję- turned into i.

Palatal consonants stayed palatal, but *ĺ turned into j in the west and *t’ turned into *č́. Consonant *g turned into ɣ and into x at the end of a word.

Morphology
Natisone Valley dialect still has neuter gender in singular, but it feminized in plural. It still has masculine and neuter o-stem declension, as well as feminine a-stem and i-stem declension. There is also masculine j-stem, as well as remains of feminine v-stem and neuter s-, t- and n-stem. These are mostly one word examples. It, however, has more archaic and pretty different declension patterns from Standard Slovene: Infinitive lost the final -i, but has the same accent as long infinitive.

Vocabulary
There are many loanwords borrowed from Friulian and Italian, but not as much as in Torre Valley dialect. Words from Proto-Slavic received pretty close evolution to that of Standard Slovene, so both varieties are mutually intelligible.

Orthography
Orthography is mainly based on western microdialects. It has 26 letters, 25 of them are the same as in Slovene alphabet and added is $\langleǧ\rangle$ for sound, which is in Standard Slovene written with $\langledž\rangle$.

The standard Slovene orthography, used in almost all situations, uses only the letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet plus $\langleč\rangle$, $\langleš\rangle$, $\langlež\rangle$, and $\langleǧ\rangle$ : The orthography thus underdifferentiates several phonemic distinctions:


 * Stress, vowel length and tone are not distinguished, except with optional diacritics when it is necessary to distinguish between similar words with a different meaning.
 * Consonant is not differentiated from its spirantized version,  and are both written as $\langleg\rangle$.
 * Consonants and  also are not differentiated, both being written as $\langleč\rangle$.
 * Letter $\langleu\rangle$ is used to write syllabic, as well as non-syllabic "false u".

Regulation
Natisone Valley dialect is unregulated, thus a fair degree of variation, both in pronunciation and in writing is common. Eastern microdialects are completely unstandardised, as most other Slovene dialects. In contrast, western microdialects have its own dictionary and grammar, written by Nino Špehonja in 2012. The dictionary still allows many variations in writing, and consequently pronunciation. Main reason for different spellings is akanye, which is more common in some microdialects and less in other, e. g. the word for 'bonfire' can either be written as kries or krias.