engleski

Cultural Implications of Attitudes and Evaluative Reactions toward Dialect Variation in Croatian Youth

As a consequence of political changes and war, during the last decade the migration processes have been intensified and incomers from other parts of Croatia and neighbouring countries, have moved to the town of Zagreb and have changed it considerably. These demographic changes have also had an influence on the language used in the area and on language attitudes towards the Standard Croatian, local vernacular and other dialectal varieties. The aim of this study is to explore the awareness that speakers, Croatian adolescents resident in Zagreb, have of their own language variety and their attitudes toward different other dialect varieties. The data were collected using the speech guise method and a questionnaire in order to assess both conscious and unconscious components of these linguistic evaluations. In a multidialectal context, the dialect is often considered to be the most important dimension of social identity and may represent an indicator of group categorization (us vs. them). In this way, the values attributed to language/dialect can be used to promote identity, contrast, affiliation, power or solidarity and provide a means of operationalising the relationship between language and cultural identity. The implied social, regional and ethnic identities of the results are interpreted in terms of social identity theory of group distinctiveness and possible relational outcomes of the interactive acculturation model.

anthropology; linguistic diversity; language dynamics; croatian dialect; adolescents

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