There is not general agreement among scholars on the degree or type of standardization, or better, normalization, exhibited by Slovak texts before the 18th-19th century codifying efforts of Anton Bernolák, Ľudovít Štúr and their followers. Indeed, disagreement on this issue is greater the earlier the time period under consideration. The present study focuses on the 16th century and the degree and type of standardization/normalization exhibited in a corpus of 152 administrative-legal texts (judicial and municipal records, official correspondence, account books, etc.) from all four major Slovak dialect regions – Moravian, West, Central and East Slovak. The author examines the textual distribution of reflexes from nine diacritic phonological developments to determine whether the corpus provides phonological evidence for the existence of 16th century Slovak interdialectal norms and to establish the areal scope and linguistic basis of any attested interdialectal phonological normalization.

This study is a quantitative investigation of a large corpus of 16th-century Slovak administrative-legal texts that analyzes the degree of morphological normalization in early vernacular writing in the Slovak lands (prior to the codification of standard Slovak in the 18th and 19th centuries). Nine key morphological features are examined, and the patterns of normalization observed are assessed to determine their geographical scope and possible linguistic basis. Accompanying the morphological investigation is a theoretical and methodological discussion and application of Diglossia as a sociolinguistic framework for interpretation of the interaction of written Czech and Slovak in precodification Slovakia. This book thus provides both new empirical data on the language of 16th-century Slovak texts, as well as a conceptual model for sociolinguistic interpretation of the early developmental stages of vernacular writing in Slovakia.