engleski

Dialect levelling and changes in semiotic space

The Betina variety is a local Čakavian-Croatian variety spoken on the island of Murter in central Dalmatia. The influence of Romance has left visible traces on the island’s vocabulary, just as it has in many other Čakavian varieties of the Eastern Adriatic coast. The Betina variety, through contact with other, more dominant dialectal varieties or the Croatian standard variety, and as a consequence of language accommodation, is losing many of its most salient, mostly Romance, characteristics, a process that is leading to a loss of local distinctiveness. This paper proposes a semiotic approach to the problem of dialect levelling and assumes that it occurs not only because of language accommodation, but also as a consequence of the alteration and transformation of the culture and of the ways of life referred to as semiotic spaces. Since a language or dialect can function only in interaction with its semiotic space, its change leads to language change. The analysis was conducted on a selected lexical corpus of Romance origin and involved interviews with young speakers living in Betina. The results of this study are expected to confirm that in Betina, particularly in the vocabulary of young speakers, Romance elements are disappearing as a consequence of the disappearance of human practices and of utilitarian and sociocultural objects that once had an important role and which used to create very particular and distinctive semiotic spaces.

Betina, Čakavian, Croatian, Romance, Loanwords, Semiotic Space, Dialect levelling

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