Govor, Vol. 38 No. 1, 2021.
Review article
https://doi.org/10.22210/govor.2021.38.05
Why is the place of accent in Croatian difficult for Italian‐speaking students?
Vesna Deželjin
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences University of Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The most enduring and prominent phenomenon in L1 transfer is the transfer on the segmental
level, something which foreigners learning Croatian as L2 usually point out. The paper describes difficulties and deviations in the pronunciation of Croatian made by Italian-speaking
students who learn Croatian in Italy (University of "G. D’Annunzio", Chieti-Pescara) and in Croatia (attending the course Croatian as L2 and FL at Croaticum – Centre for Croatian as a
Second and Foreign Language of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of
Zagreb – during their stay in Zagreb through the Erasmus Programme). The results of the
observations and the study indicate, among other things, that the Italian-speaking learners of
Croatian in Zagreb perceived Zagreb accent variety as a familiar one and close to their mother
tongue, so that the prevailing tendency to stress the pen-ultimate syllable may indicate the
possibility of interference with the Italian accent system. Examples of hyper-corrected stressing also occur frequently.
Keywords
Italian-speaking subjects; Croatian as L2; place of accent; system of errors
Hrčak ID:
260703
URI
Publication date:
21.7.2021.
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