Before us is the Croatian Language Month, a prestigious educational and cultural manifestation with a rich language program organized by the Zagreb Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics, which begins in Croatia on February 21, on the day of the International Mother Language Day.
Croats abroad are particularly sensitive to nurturing their mother tongue. This year’s 24th edition of UNESCO’s International Mother Language Day, whose program focuses on the slogan “multilingual education – a necessity to transform education” on a global level, supports this original linguistic sensitivity of displaced people of Croatian roots of various emigrant generations. It is an occasion for a specific inventory of the most promising contemporary research into the mother tongue of our natives from 12 countries of the European neighbourhood where members of the Croatian autochthonous minority have lived for centuries (Austria, Italy, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Serbia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Romania and Bulgaria). There are approximately 500,000 Croatian speakers in that area, many of whom are bilingual.
The preservation of our local idioms is based on the awareness of the importance of linguistic diversity as an intangible cultural asset, which every newly published work contributes to such as the Dictionary Treasures and the Folk Culture of Martinac by Ernest Barić, PhD., the leading Hungarian-Croatian philologist, professor emeritus and founder of the Department of Croatian Language and Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Pécs, the Dictionary of Pomurie Croats by the Kajkavian dialectologist, Erika Rácz, or the Dictionary of Santovo Croats by Živko Mandić, a renowned Slavist and onomastics scholar from Hungary. The special feature of Croatian dialect lexicography is that dictionaries of Croatian languages outside the Croatian language space, which are mostly minority linguistic islands (German: Sprachinseln) in the majority foreign language (German, Italian, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Romanian, Serbian, Macedonian…) linguistic landscape.
In the same way as the national philologies on the soil of the European Union differ according to the results of research in other linguistic disciplines, they also differ according to the achievements in the lexicographic description of regionally limited native languages of autochthonous minorities. While some dialect lexicographies abound in high-quality dialect dictionaries, for other dialects such works are still relatively rare. Despite some valuable dictionaries created mainly at the end of the 20th century (the dialect of the island of Vrgada, the Komiža dialect, the version of Čakavian dialect spoken on Central Dalmatian islands), Croatian dialect lexicography was a better fit into the second group, but in the meantime, after a series of dialect dictionaries published freely after the 1990s, our linguistic geography has come very close to the standards of the first group of well-processed local languages. What truly contributed to this in Croatia were numerous notable editions of Croatian linguistics by the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics, as well as editions by a wide variety of publishers from various parts of Our Beautiful Homeland, among which we single out the Dictionary of the Kajkavian Lower Sutla Ikavian dialect, as well as the Dictionary of the Slavonia, Baranja and Srijem dialects by an ordinary collector of linguistic treasures, Martin Jakšić, published by the Zagreb publishing house Dominović…
Interestingly, the selected Dictionary of the Kajkavian Lower Sutla Ikavian dialect by a group of prominent authors (Štefica Hanzir, Jasna Horvat, Božica Jakolić, Željko Jozić, Mijo Lončarić) has been digitized at the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics in cooperation with the Ivan Perkovac Association for the preservation of Kajkavian Ikavian and the promotion of native cultural heritage. Moreover, daily additions of new words, phraseological and collocational structures, and sound recordings have been enabled (http://ikavci.ihjj.hr/). It is the first digitized dictionary of a printed dictionary in which the lexical treasure of the speech of a dialect that can be found on the List of Protected Intangible Cultural Properties of the Republic of Croatia – the Kajkavian Lower Sutlan (Ikavian) dialect, is collected. The dialect was included in that list in 2008. The project was implemented with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia.
However, according to the number of networked philologists and the results published so far in older Croatian diaspora, the linguistic project Dialektforschung – Burgenland Croats’ Dialects has undoubtedly stood out recently with its three new books which together have as many as 1,055 pages. We can, therefore, conclude that the ecolinguistic project in the “German ocean” has been enriched with three linguistic gems whose publisher is the Croatian Cultural and Documentary Centre from Željezno, managed by Martin Ivančić. The mentioned book gems are entitled: Burgenland Croats’ Dialects. Vol. 1. Croatian Dialect of Burgenland Croats (2019); Burgenland Croats’ Dialects. Vol. 2. Our Way of Speech. Audiobook. (2020) and Golden Fish.Vol. 3. Poetry for Children and Youth in Burgenland Croats’ Dialect (2021). The project initiative was initiated by the philologist Edith Mühlgaszner from Čemba once a supervisor of minority education, gathering teachers of the Croatian language with the aim of documenting the local dialects of the Burgenland Croats on the soil of Central Europe. Gradually, this initiative grew into a real venture, joined by the agile Edith Mühlgaszner, experts and the most prominent urban erudites such as Ivo Szucsich, Zorka Kinda-Berlakovich and academician Nikola Bencsics.
The philologists from Austria were joined by a group of excellent dialectologists from Croatia: Anita Celinić, Josip Lisac, Mira Menac-Mihalić, Robert Špralja and the excellent Croatologist Sanja Vulić and with them literary historian Robert Bacalja. Help was also provided by Šandor Horvath, a connoisseur of Croatian folk literature from the Hungarian side. 49 local dialects of all three dialects of Burgenland Croatian from 4 countries are included: dialects from Austria, Hungary and Slovakia and the surviving dialect of South Moravian Croats from the Czech Republic. Congratulations to all participants in the project! We hope that this material will also be digitized in open internet access.
From the perspective of the global village, the contribution of these humble philologists from Austria, Hungary and Croatia is also not negligible, not only because of Humboldt’s famous claim that “the true homeland is really the language”, but also because of their contribution to the preservation of linguistic diversity, as warned by The Australian National University study signed by a group of authors led by Lindell Bromham under the title “Global predictors of language endangerment and the future of linguistic diversity” available in the online journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. According to the study, about half of the global languages are in danger of disappearing. UNESCO has therefore declared the current decade the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022 – 2032), which aims to strengthen the rights of people from minority language communities. Experts are advised to adopt teaching programs that support bilingual education and encourage the mastery of the autochthonous language, which is joined by our philologists from the countries where the Croatian autochthonous minority lives.
Photo. Petar Tyran
Written by: Vesna Kukavica
