The Kajkavian dialects of Croatian are spoken in northwestern Croatia and in Gorski Kotar, as well as in small communities in Burgenland (Austria) and Banat (Romania, Serbia). In the South Slavic dialect continuum, they form a link between Slovene in the northwest and other dialect groups in the southeast. They are generally archaic and valuable for the reconstruction of Proto-Slavic due to features of their prosody.

Kajkavian, named after the word kaj ‘what’, is a South Slavic dialect group. Together with two o…