engleski

Croatian Biblical Texts in the Early Modern Period: A Historical-Sociolinguistic Approach to Language Change

This chapter provides an overview of the historical and (socio)linguistic context surrounding the translation of biblical texts in late fifteenth and sixteenth century Croatia. The Croatian language community during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period was essentially multilingual. In addition to Latin, which served as lingua franca, different Slavic literary languages were used depending on the text type. “Diglossia” and “triglossia” are nowadays commonly used terms to describe the Croatian language situation from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Croatian Church Slavonic remained the most prestigious type of literary language until the sixteenth century when its high status finally collapsed, and it lost the competition with Croatian vernaculars. It is during that century that we witness the coexistence of several different concepts of literary language in liturgical texts (as the most conservative genre). The chapter traces the demise of diglossia during the sixteenth century when three different trends can be seen in Croatian translations of biblical texts: the adoption of a high variety, a low variety and finally a mixed variety.

historical sociolinguistics, diglossia, high variety, low variety, mixed variety, literary language, Croatian biblical texts

Knjiga je objavljena u više formata, ovo su različiti ISBN brojevi: 978-0-367-55214-5 (hbk), 978-0-367-55215-2 (pbk), 978-1-003-09244-5 (ebk)