Review article
https://doi.org/10.17234/Croatica.66.8
ON METATONIC ACCENT IN STANDARD CROATIAN
Helena Delaš
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
In standard Croatian, at the level of its accents, the procedures of accent adaptation of loanwords are applied, which originate from the earliest stages of the development of standard Croatian. In reference to the new štokavian accent, we can speak of its two large areas: the Mediterranean (which consistently shifts the accent as in viòlīna) and the continental (which adapts it tonally as in violína). Therefore, different accents of the same word are possible within the system, and more recently preference has increasingly been given to the procedure of metatonic accent adaptation in order to correct the excessive (often hyperštokavian) shift of the accent on the one hand and on the other to provide, at least theoretically, resistance to the tendency of descending accentuation in loanwords in standard pronunciation practice. The paper defines and analyses the accent corpus, in which a systematic shift in favour of ascending accentuation occurs at the level of the prescribed norm, and argues that such normative procedure is sociolinguistically unrealistic because no recording of the accent situation in Croatian public polyfunctional communication supports it. Insisting on an accent code modelled in such a way is especially unacceptable in the teaching of the Croatian language (both as a mother tongue and as a foreign language).
Keywords
Croatian accentuation; loanwords; metatonic accent; standard Croatian
Hrčak ID:
287155
URI
Publication date:
13.12.2022.
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