engleski

Diaspora Croatian in contact with other languages

Of the approx. 6.67 million Croatian-speakers worldwide, about 1.6 million are located in the Croatian diaspora, from Latin America to Western Europe, and from North America to Australia. A multi-site project on Croatian as it is spoken in the diaspora was initiated in 2015 which encompassed ten corpora of linguistic data collected in nine different countries across four continents. Backgrounded by an overview of previous research into the speech of Croatian emigrants, this paper defines and explains the notion of ‘Croatian as a heritage language’. Our focus then turns to the speakers themselves, and we draw on a combined sample of corpora that consist of recorded speech samples gained from 300 Croatian-origin emigrants. These included first-, second- and third-generation speakers. We provide an overview of features in Croatian as a heritage language in regard to the following four areas: pragmatics ; lexicon ; calques and loan translation ; code-switching. In our presentation of examples from all ten samples we compare data between countries and vintages of migration, and between speakers of older generations to those of younger generations. In our examination of examples we also compare these with forms used in varieties of Croatian that are spoken in the homeland, both non-standard and standard. Our observations provide a contemporary and cross- national description of Croatian as a heritage language. At the same time, we position heritage Croatian within the field of contact linguistics research.

heritage language, Croatian as a heritage language, Croatian diaspora

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