Croatian: Overview article

Diaspora Language Contact. The Speech of Croatian Speakers Abroad, 2021

This chapter examines some of the features of Croatian spoken by Croatian immigrants living in Italy. Italy is home to a large number of Croatian-origin residents but not all of these have active proficiency in Croatian. Contact between Croatia and Croatian-speaking areas on the east coast of the Adriatic Sea (and beyond) with Italy is long-standing and substantial. This is due to the proximity of the two countries and historical ties that record that Italy (and the Venetian Empire from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries) was the destination for merchants, sailors, scholars, members of the clergy and many others who settled or who would often reside there for longer or shorter periods. Permanent settlement of Croatian-speakers on the western side of the Adriatic Sea also occurred – the most conspicuous example of this are three remaining villages in Molise inhabited by migrants who left the Neretva River valley and central Dalmatia 500 years ago (see Ščukanec, Breu and Vuk, this volume). However, in general, settlement of Croatian-speakers has been across the northern and north-eastern parts of Italy, and large numbers of Croatian-origin residents still reside in these regions. Many of them have shifted to Italian, while there are others who use Croatian actively or passively. There are also large numbers of Italian-origin residents originally from Istria – the Kvarner Bay islands and Dalmatia who were evacuated to or who have resettled in Italy and who usually had proficiency in Croatian, at least at the point of their departure even if they then used Croatian infrequently after their arrival in Italy. Most members of this latter group no longer use Croatian actively, and the focus of this chapter is on more recent Croatian-origin migrants in Italy.

Collegium antropologicum, 2004

This paper gives a presentation of the condition of an endangered language located on the southern part of the Italian peninsula, spoken by a small community of transplanted Slavic population who fled the Eastern Adriatic coast during the Turkish invasion of the Balkan peninsula and have lived in complete isolation from related Slavic languages for five centuries surrounded by a majority of Italian speaking population. The overview of contact induced changes shows a high level of interferences at all structural levels resulting in a relatively stable mixed idiom. Preservation and revitalization efforts are discussed particularly in relation to the importance of writing and codification of the language as well as possible steps that can be undertaken in view of the link between language and the group cultural identity.

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Cognitive technologies, 2023

This chapter presents a summary of the Language Report on Croatian (Tadić 2022) on general features of the language and the level of technological support it receives since the previous report ). The chapter includes information about the typological and structural features of Croatian, its status and usage in the digital sphere and its support through Language Technologies. The Croatian language belongs to the West-South Slavic subgroup of the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European linguistic family. It is the native language of over 5 million speakers. Croatian consists of the dialects and standard national language of the Croats, and is the official language of just under 4 million people in Croatia. Along with Bosnian and Serbian, it is one of the three official languages in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where it is spoken by about 400,000 people. Croatian is also spoken by national minorities in Croatia as well as by autochthonous Croatian minorities in Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Hungary, Austria, Slovakia and Italy. Croatian is also used abroad. The largest Croatian diaspora is located in Germany, followed by the US, Canada and Australia. In 2013 Croatian became the 24th official EU language. According to the 2011 census, 90.42% of the country's inhabitants are ethnic Croats, with Croatian the native language for 95.6%. Croatian is the main language used and taught in schools. The literacy ratio in Croatia is 99.2%. Croatian was written with three scripts (Glagolitic, Cyrillic, Latin), and the Latin script became dominant in the 16th century. It was standardised after 1835, when the Croatian Latin alphabet settled on its modern-day form. The phoneme inventory of the Croatian standard language consists of 6 vowels and 25 consonants. Croatian differentiates ten parts of speech, five of which inflect (nouns, adjectives, numbers (partially), pronouns, verbs) and four do not (prepositions, conjunctions, particles, exclamations), while some adverbs inflect only in com-

2008

In the territory of Hungary, there are about 40 settlements which are inhabited by Croats, whose linguistic competence embraces all the three dialects of Croatian ( kaj, što and ča). However, their language varieties are a bit different from the Croatian language in Croatia, especially at the lexical level, as a result of being physically distant from the homeland. In this paper, the mental lexicons and speech productions of some representatives of the different Croatian communities living in Hungary will be discussed. The data are gained from examination of their narrative skills which also includes the study of their disfluencies during speech production. The main goal of these experiments is to find empirical data concerning the influences of the two languages on each other.