Filologija, No. 84, 2025.
Review article
https://doi.org/10.21857/ypn4oc5pp9
The position of Kajkavian dialects in the curriculum and teaching of the Croatian language – a practical perspective
Danica Leštek
Abstract
The topic of this presentation is the position of the Kajkavian dialect in the teaching of the Croatian language in primary schools in the Republic of Croatia. The main focus will be on the results of the analysis of the 2019 curriculum, as the most important school document, and on the textbooks for the subject Croatian language from the first to the eighth grade. The analysis was conducted on around eighty textbooks from various publishers, published from 2015 to 2024, with the aim of showing the extent to which dialectal content, primarily Kajkavian, is included in them.
Furthermore, the article deals with the current situation in practice and presents the challenges faced by enthusiastic teachers who, in schools in the Kajkavian-speaking area, are trying to fill the "holes" in the curriculum and, consequently, in school materials with extracurricular activities. The extracurricular activities of the Mala Kajkaviana group, which has been organized by teachers at the Donja Stubica Primary School for twenty-five years, will be presented.
The last part of the text offers suggestions for a more comprehensive and timely treatment of dialectal literary and linguistic topics within the teaching of the Croatian language. Here, by the phrase "Croatian language" we do not mean only the Croatian standard language, but the whole of the idioms within Croatian linguistic stratification (dialectal and sociolinguistic). Such an approach would seemingly increase the volume of the already extensive material, which is mostly focused on learning the standard language; however, we believe that this problem can be overcome by creating a different type of curriculum and textbooks. Therefore, at the very end of the paper, the idea of a curriculum that would open up the possibility of creating regionally designed textbooks of the Croatian language that would be largely uniform, but in one part would contain regional literary and linguistic teaching units - both Kajkavian and Čakavian as well as non-standard Štokavian. This would enable teachers, given the area in which the school they teach is located, to draw on materials for the processing and popularization of local literary and linguistic themes, and to have formal support and encouragement for this. The goal of such Croatian language teaching would not only be the acquisition of the Croatian standard language, which is important, but also the parallel respect and preservation of the local dialects of pupils for as long as possible.
Keywords
Kajkavian dialect, curriculum for the subject Croatian language, reading books, textbooks
Hrčak ID:
339781
URI
Publication date:
24.11.2025.
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