engleski

Language policy and language contacts in Austria- Hungary: the case of Croatia,

Throughout its history, Croatia has been an area of intense language contacts, with the Romance/Italian influence being dominant along the coast as a result of four centuries of Venetian rule and intense contacts with different Italian regions, Austrian German exerting a strong impact in western continental areas, while Turkish had some influence in the easternmost parts of the country due to the vicinity of the Ottoman Empire. Language contact phenomena included both close and distant borrowing, as well as extensive code- switching. Historically, language contacts involved different dialects, rather than standard languages. The paper will outline the historical context of language contacts in Croatia focusing on the Austro-Hungarian period when the Croatian territory was divided between the two parts of the Empire, Croatia, Slavonia and the town of Rijeka belonging to the Hungarian, and Istria and Dalmatia belonging to the Austrian part. On the macro-level, legislation regulating the use of languages in the multilingual empire will be presented, ranging from Article 19 of the Law on Nationalities (Nationalitätengesetz) of 1867 granting equal rights to the use of national languages, to language provisions in the Civil and Criminal codes, confronted with national ideologies where language functioned as a very important symbol of national identity. Nineteenth-century struggles for the use of Croatian in public domains were accompanied with strong purist tendencies, especially targeted against the German influence. The legislation, as well as ideological issues and language attitudes as voiced in Croatian newspapers published at the time will be set against the actual presence of language-contact phenomena exemplified in literary texts from the period, primarily plays and dialogues in narrative literary texts, which can be assumed to reflect to some degree everyday language spoken at the time. Analysis of language contact phenomena (Clyne 2003)will be extended by applying discourse historical approach (DHA) (Wodak 2009). Research questions are centered on the extent to which purist tendencies were actually reflected in a corpus of literary texts and newspaper articles published in the period under consideration and the ways in which language ideologies were reflected in language use.

language contact, Austria-Hungary, legislation

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