THE VERNACULAR OF NIŠ IN CHILDREN’S POETRY OD MALEČKO DO GOLEMO

The paper analyses dialectal features of the collection of poems for children Od malecko do golemo by Slavka Vojinovic Masoncic. The collection was published in Nis in 2018, and it represents one of rare examples of literature for children written in a dialect. This collection has caught the public’s attention through social networks, primarily because of the poem “Nole, tatko na tenis”. The subject matter of the majority of poems refers to childhood, children’s joys and tricks. The poems have incited a significant interest with readers, primarily due to the Prizren-South Morava dialect. The aim of this paper is to describe phonetic, morphological, syntactic and lexical characteristics of the poems, to compare the determined linguistic image with the dialectal descriptions of the vernacular language of the city of Nis, and, therefore, to link the language of the poems to the subject matter, which should lead to the conclusions about the stylistic function of dialects in a literary work.