Pannonian as a West Slavic Language: Dialect Vocabulary¹

Abstract On the basis of four phonological criteria, ca. 140 early Slavic lexical borrowings are identified in Hungarian. These loanwords are attributed to the Pannonian language, a hypothetical Slavic language spoken in the Carpathian Basin in the second half of the first millennium AD before the arrival of the Magyars. The proposed method of identifying dialectisms is based on independent sampling and exact matching in morphology and semantics. Etymological analysis discloses a substantial number of lexical connections between Pannonian and the West Slavic languages, whereas there are almost no specific ties between Pannonian and South Slavic (excluding Slovene). Lexically, Pannonian has a strong affinity with Czech‐Slovak and Slovene. The quantitative analysis of ancient dialectisms suggests that Pannonian and therefore Slovene historically belong to the West Slavic subgroup.