Why the Slovak Language has Three Dialects: A Case Study in Historical Perceptual Dialectology

Dialect taxonomies emerge from a political context, and change inresponse to political events. This article, a case study in"Historical Perceptual Dialectology," tracks the history of Slovakdialect taxonomies. In the early nineteenth century, outside observerssaw the Slovaks as partly Polish, and Partly Czech, while Slovaksavants classified themselves either with open-ended lists based onprominent towns, or into dual ethnonymic categories such as"Germano-Slavic" or "Polno-Slavic." The modern tripartite subdivisionsof East Slovak, Central Slovak, and Western Slovak do not reflectlinguistic reality, but instead emerged from Ludovit Stur's attempt tocodify a literary Slovak, specifically his desire to overcomeconfessional divisions between Catholics and Protestants.