Southern Chakavian

Southern Chakavian (Serbo-Croatian: južnočakavski dijalekt) or Ikavian Chakavian is a subdialect of the Chakavian dialect of Serbo-Croatian. It is spoken in the area south of the Middle Chakavian area, in a narrow strip of Croatian Littoral and the neighbouring islands: outskirts of Split and Zadar; Korčula, Pelješac, Brač, Hvar, Vis and Šolta.

The speech of Split originally belonged to this dialect, but under the influence of Shtokavian immigrants and standard Croatian promoted by the state media, a local idiom that has lost many of characteristic Chakavian traits developed, even though a part of older population retains Chakavian dialect in their speech.

Lots of speeches of this dialect mix Chakavian and Shtokavian features. It is assumed that in the past this dialect covered larger territory in the hinterland, being gradually suppressed by constant migrations who carried Shtokavian speech at its cost.

Common Slavic yat phoneme had a reflex of /i/ in this dialect. Thus we have lip, divojka, mriža, as opposed to Standard Croatian (Neo-Shtokavian) lijȇp, djèvōjka, mrȅža, all descending from earlier Proto-West-South-Slavic forms *lěpъ, *děvojka, *mrěža.

Molise Croatian also belongs to this dialect, which is Western Shtokavian with Ikavian accent, but with a massive Chakavian adstratum.