open access

https://hdl.handle.net/2115/47609

Croatian in South Moravia : Language Maintenance and Sociolinguistic Circumstances

日本語

2011

北海道大学スラブ研究センター

Slavic Studies

58

61-90

This paper describes the linguistic features of Moravian Croatian (abbreviated to MoCro), a regional variation of the South Slavic Čakavian dialect once spoken in the southern-most part of Moravia, and examines the sociolinguistic circumstances under which MoCro has been used. The paper is divided into three sections. The first section outlines the history of the Croatian inhabitants in South Moravia, referring to previous studies on Croatian ethnic elements in Moravia and adjacent regions. The second section focuses on MoCro and reveals that it retains Čakavian features but shows at the same time peculiarity as a result of language contact. Based on these findings, the third section deals with the sociolinguistic circumstances to which the Croats in Moravia accommodated themselves. The goal of the paper is to present how social factors can be relevant to language maintenance. The Moravian Croats as well as the Burgenland Croats living in the Austrian state of Burgenland are descendants of ethnic Croats migrated from the northwest part of the Balkan Peninsula during the sixteenth century. In the course of history, most of the Croats settled in South Moravia were assimilated into German or Czech populations, and Croatian trails were lost except for in the three "Croatian" villages of Frielištof (present day Jevišovka), Nova Prerava (Nový Přerav), and Dobro Polje (Dobré Pole). The Croats in these three villages maintained their inherent language as a communication code up to the mid twentieth century. After World War II, however, the Czech Communist regime made a decision to displace the Croats to the northern parts of Moravia, by which the tradition of Croatian culture and language in Moravia was terminated. The author of this paper has conducted research on MoCro and its background history with help of a Croat born in Frielištof. The linguistic analysis shows that MoCro has kept prominent Čakavian features, such as diphthongization of the mid-high vowels, usage of the typical Čakavian interrogative words ča, zač, and kade, and reflex of *ĕ according to "Meyer-Jakubinski's law." In MoCro, at the same time, particular change induced by language contact is observed: German influence is attested particularly at the lexical level, but partly on phrase syntax as well, and Czech influence is manifested in the borrowing of derivational morphemes, verb-inflectional morphemes, and basic functional words. Thus, MoCro can be characterized as a linguistic code with inherent Čakavian features but modified by the language contact situation. The author further discusses the sociolinguistic circumstances of Moravian Croats and unfolds positive and negative factors in its maintenance. Demographic materials and anthropological findings suggest that endogamy was a significant, although not overriding, factor in language secession. Religious value attached to the language in question is considered to be crucial as well, as the Croats in Moravia hold a tradition of praying in MoCro and rely on a prayer book written in Čakavian in the seventeenth century. In terms of the social status of the language, however, MoCro is characterized as "low," dominated by the "high" languages of German and Czech: German had been a prestige language all through the history of the Moravian Croats up until the beginning of the twentieth century; Czech somehow replaced German in the independent Czechoslovakia after World War I. Due to this low social status of being a language of home use and daily communication, MoCro lead the Croats to represent themselves as Germanophones at the beginning of the twentieth century. Overall linguistic analysis and examination of the sociolinguistic circumstances of the Moravian Croats has led the author to conclude that MoCro at the time of destruction of the Croatian villages subsisted through a balance of language maintenance and language shift.

紀要論文

Version of Record

0562-6579

AN0012574X