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LANGUAGE CONTACT AND STABILITY OF BASIC VOCABULARY: CROATIAN LOANWORDS FOR BODY PARTS IN VLASHKI/ZHEYANSKI (ISTRO-ROMANIAN)
Zvjezdana Vrzić
; Filozofski fakultet – New York University, Rijeka – New York
Robert Doričić
orcid.org/0000-0002-4948-956X
; Medicinski fakultet, Rijeka
Sažetak
Vlashki/Zheyanski, or Istro-Romanian, is a severely endangered Eastern Romance
language spoken on the Istrian peninsula in Croatia. The language is now spoken by less
than 120 fluent and active speakers, most of them over the age of 50. The Vlashki/
Zheyanski-speaking communities are in the midst of the language shift to Croatian.
Since cohabitation, population mix and bilingualism have characterized these
communities for centuries, as a result of intense and long-term contact pressures, the
language has undergone many lexical and structural changes under the influence of
Croatian. In the lexical domain, the language has adopted many cultural borrowings, but
also a significant number of core borrowings. The paper explores the extent of contact
influence in the basic vocabulary of body part terms, a section of the lexicon assumed to
be one of the most resistant to contact interference. Lexical equivalents of 46 body part
meanings found in three different historical sources and in authors’ own field data are
compared. The comparison shows that a significant number of body part words has been
borrowed from dialectal Croatian, that the number of loanwords has doubled since the
beginning of the 20th century, that standard Croatian has become a factor of contact
influence recently, and that the Zheyanski dialect of the language has preserved a greater
number of native body part words.
Ključne riječi
contact interference; lexical change; basic vocabulary; body part words; Istro-Romanian; Croatian loanwords
Hrčak ID:
133647
URI
Datum izdavanja:
30.1.2015.
Posjeta: 3.828 *