engleski

The perception of Croatian Church Slavonic among early modern Croatian speakers: A contribution to the Slavic historical perceptual dialectology

Perceptual dialectology is the study of how non- linguists perceive and understand dialect variation (Preston 1999 ; Long & Preston 2002). The focus of previous research has been put mainly on contemporary language situations in Japanese, Dutch and American English, while the study of non-linguists’ perception of dialect variation in the past remains in the background. Historical perceptual dialectology is particularly underdeveloped in the Slavic world, especially when it comes to the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. Since the current methods developed and used within this field are all primarily respondent-based (Montgomery & Cramer 2016), the mentioned trend can probably be taken as a consequence of their limited applicability in the research on the perception of language variation directed towards previous centuries. In this presentation, I examine the perception of Croatian Church Slavonic among Croatian speakers in the Early Modern Period. Croatian Church Slavonic was the language of Croatian liturgical books written in the Glagolitic script and the most prestigious literary language variety from the end of the 11th to the first half of the 16th century (Mathiesen 1978 ; Rehder 1981 ; Mihaljević & Reinhart 2005). However, in the first half of the 16th century, we witness the collapse of its former prestige and status (c.f., e.g., Žagar 2015 ; Kuštović & Žagar 2020). In order to understand this change, I explore explicitly expressed language attitudes in different books dating from the 16th century, which can be found for the most part in Croatian and Slovenian Protestant editions. By conducting this research, I aim to provide a better insight into how Croatian speakers perceived different Slavic varieties in the Early Modern Period, and hence, contribute to the development of Slavic historical perceptual dialectology.

folk linguistics, perceptual dialectology, Croatian language, Croatian Church Slavonic language, 16th century, Šimun Kožičić Benja, Croatian Protestants

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