Čakavian Dialect

Chakavian or Čakavian (, , , sh-Latn, čakavski proper name: or own name: ''čokovski, čakavski, čekavski'') is a South Slavic regiolect or language spoken primarily by Croats along the Adriatic coast, in the historical regions of Dalmatia, Istria, Croatian Littoral and parts of coastal and southern Central Croatia (now collectively referred to as Adriatic Croatia). Chakavian, like Kajkavian, is not spoken in Serbo-Croatian-speaking regions beyond Croatia.

Chakavian was the basis for early literary standards in Croatia. Today, it is spoken almost entirely within Croatia's borders, apart from the Burgenland Croatian in Austria and Hungary and a few villages in southern Slovenia.

History

Chakavian is one of the oldest written South Slavic varieties that had made a visible appearance in legal documents—as early as 1275 ( Istrian land survey) and 1288 (Vinodol codex), the predominantly vernacular Chakavian is recorded, mixed with elements of Church Slavic. Many of these and other early Chakavian texts up to 17th century are written in Glagolitic alphabet.

Initially, the Chakavian dialect covered a much wider area than today, about two-thirds of medieval Croatia: the major part of central and southern Croatia southwards of Kupa and westwards of Una river, western and southwestern Bosnia and Herzegovina, all the islands northwest of Mljet while substratum of Chakavian apparently existed all the way to Dubrovnik.Ivo Banac; (1984) ''The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics'' p. 47; Cornell University Press, During and after the Ottoman invasion and subsequent warfare (15th–19th centuries), the Chakavian area became significantly reduced. On the Croatian mainland, it has recently been almost completely replaced by Shtokavian. It is therefore now spoken in a much smaller coastal area than indicated above.

As expected, in over nine centuries Chakavian has undergone many phonetic, morphological, and syntactical changes chiefly in the turbulent mainlands, but less in isolated islands. Yet, contemporary dialectologists are particularly interested in it since it has retained the old accentuation system characterized by a Proto-Slavic new rising accent (''neoacute'') and the old position of stress, and also numerous Proto-Slavic and some Proto-Indo-European archaisms in its vocabulary.

Another feature of Chakavian is the influence of Romance languages in its lexicon (especially from Italian, Dalmatian and Venetian).

Area of use

The use of Chakavian varies by the region where it was historically spoken. It is now mostly reduced in southwestern Croatia along the eastern Adriatic: Adriatic islands, and sporadically in the mainland coast, with rare inland enclaves up to central Croatia, and minor enclaves in Austria and Montenegro. All of those areas were in contact with Italo-Dalmatian and Eastern Romance languages, which heavily influenced it during its development.
* The majority of Adriatic islands are Chakavian, except the easternmost ones (Mljet and Elafiti and Brač, as well as the area around the city of Korčula on the island of Korčula.
* Its largest mainland area is the entire Istria peninsula, and Kvarner littoral and islands; minor coastal enclaves occur sporadically in the Dalmatian mainland around Zadar, Biograd, Split, and in Pelješac peninsula.
* Within the Croatian inland, its major area is the Gacka valley, and minor enclaves occur in Pokupje valley and Žumberak hills, northwards around Karlovac.
* Chakavians outside Croatia: a minor enclave of Bigova (Trašte) at Boka Kotorska in Montenegro, the mixed Čičarija dialect in Slovenia, refugees from the Turks in Burgenland (eastern Austria) and SW Slovakia, and recent emigrants in North America (chiefly in New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Vancouver).

Phonology

The basic phonology of Chakavian, with representation in Gaj's Latin alphabet and IPA, is as follows:

Dialects

The Chakavian dialect is divided along several criteria. According to the reflex of the Common Slavic phoneme yat */ě/, there are four varieties:

# ''Ekavian'' (northeastern Istria, Rijeka and Bakar, Cres island): */ě/ > /e/
# ''Ikavian–Ekavian'' (islands Lošinj, Krk, Rab, Pag, Dugi Otok, Ugljan, mainland Vinodol and Pokupje): */ě/ > /i/ or /e/, according to Jakubinskij's law
# ''Ikavian'' (southwestern Istria, islands Brač, Hvar, Vis, Korčula, Pelješac, Dalmatian coast at Zadar and Split, inland Gacka): */ě/ > /i/
# ''Ijekavian'' (Lastovo island, Janjina on Pelješac): */ě/ > /je/ or /ije/

Obsolete literature commonly refers to Ikavian–Ekavian dialects as "mixed", which is a misleading term because the yat reflexes were governed by Jakubinskij's law.

According to their tonal (accentual) features, Chakavian dialects are divided into the following groups:

# dialects with the "classical" Chakavian three-tone system
# dialects with two tonic accents
# dialects with four tonic accents similar to that of Shtokavian dialects
# dialects with four-tonic Shtokavian system
# dialects mixing traits of the first and the second group

Using a combination of accentual and phonological criteria, Croatian dialectologist Dalibor Brozović divided Chakavian into six (sub)dialects:

There is no unanimous opinion on the set of traits a dialect has to possess to be classified as Chakavian (rather than its admixture with Shtokavian or Kajkavian); the following traits were mostly proposed:
* interrogatory pronoun is ''"ča"'' or ''"zač"'' (on some islands also ''"ca"'' or ''"zace''");
* old accentuation and 3 accents (mostly in ultima or penultima);
* phonological features that yield /a/ for Old Slavic phonemes in characteristic positions: "language" is ''jazik'' (or zajik) in Chakavian and ''jezik'' in Shtokavian;
* /j/ as in Slovene and Kajkavian where Shtokavian has /dʑ/ ⟨đ⟩: Chakavian, Slovene, Kajkavian ''meja'', Shtokavian ''međa'' ("border");
* historic /m/ shifted to /n/ at the end of words, unlike in Shtokavian: standard Croatian ''volim'' ("I love"), ''sam'' ("I am"), ''selom'' ("village" - Instrumental case), Chakavian ''volin'', ''san'', ''selon''.
* in conditional occur specific prefixes: ''bin-, biš-, bimo-, bite-'', ''bis''
* contracted or lacking aorist tense;
* some subdialects on island of Pag have kept the archaic form of imperfect

Non-palatal tsakavism

Besides the usual Chakavian (with typical pronoun "ča"), in some Adriatic islands and in eastern Istria another special variant is also spoken which lacks most palatals, with other parallel deviations called ''"tsakavism"'' (cakavizam):
* palatal "č" is replaced by the sibilant "ts" (c): pronouns ca and ''zac'' (or ''ce'' and ''zace'').
* palatals ''š'' (sh) and ''ž'' (zh) are replaced by sibilants ''s'' and ''z'' (or transitive sj and zj).
* ''đ'' (dj), ''lj'' and ''nj'' are replaced by the simple ''d, l'' and ''n'' (without iotation).
* Frequent ''diphthongs'' instead of simple vowels: o > ''uo,'' a > ''oa,'' e > ', etc.
* ''Yat'' (jat): longer ''y'' (= ue) exists in addition to the usual short ''i'' (or e).
* Appurtenance), Hvar town, and the entire island of Vis with adjacent islets.

The first two features are similar to mazurzenie in Polish, where it is present in many dialects, and tsokanye, occurring in the Old Novgorod dialect.

Chakavian literary language

Since Chakavian was the first South Slavic dialect to emerge from the Church Slavic matrix, both literacy and literature in this dialect abound with numerous texts - from legal and liturgical to literary: lyric and epic poetry, drama, novel in verses, as well as philological works that contain Chakavian vocabulary. Chakavian was the main public and official language in medieval Croatia from 13th to 16th century.

Monuments of literacy began to appear in the 11th and 12th centuries, and artistic literature in the 15th. While there were two zones of Čakavian, northern and southern (both mainly along the Adriatic coast and islands, with centres like Senj, Zadar, Split, Hvar, Korčula), there is enough unity in the idiom to allow us to speak of one Chakavian literary language with minor regional variants.

This language by far surpassed the position of a simple vernacular dialect and strongly influenced other Serbo-Croatian literary dialects, particularly Shtokavian: the first Shtokavian texts such as the Vatican Croatian Prayer Book, dated to 1400, exhibit numerous literary Chakavianisms. The early Shtokavian literary and philological output, mainly from Dubrovnik (1500–1600) up to Džore Držić, was essentially a mixed Shtokavian–Chakavian idiom, mostly similar to the Jekavian Chakavian of Lastovo and Janjina.

Chakavian literature uses many words of Latin, Dalmatian, and Italian origin due to the numerous contacts with these languages.

The most famous early Chakavian author is Marko Marulić in 15th/16th century. Also, the first Croatian dictionary, authored by Faust Vrančić, is mostly Chakavian in its form. The tradition of the Chakavian literary language had declined in the 18th century, but it has helped shape the standard Croatian language in many ways (chiefly in morphology and phonetics), and Chakavian dialectal poetry is still a vital part of Croatian literature.

The most prominent representatives of Chakavian poetry in the 20th century are Mate Balota, Vladimir Nazor and Drago Gervais. In 1938, Balota's collection of poems ''Dragi kamen'' was published in Zagreb, while his only novel, '' Tight Country: A Novel from Istrian Folk Life'', was published in 1946. The novel became a cult among Kvarner and Istrian Croats.
At the end of the 1980s in Istria there began a special subgenre of pop-rock music " Ča-val" ''(Cha wave)''; artists that were part of this scene used the Chakavian dialect in their lyrics, and often fused rock music with traditional Istra-Kvarner music. Notable singers in the Chakavian dialect include Alen Vitasović and Gustafi.

Recent studies

Due to its archaic nature, early medieval development, and corpus of vernacular literacy, the typical Chakavian dialect has attracted numerous dialectologists who have documented its nuances, so that Chakavian was among the best described Slavic dialects, but its atypical tsakavism was partly neglected and less studied. The representative modern work in the field is ''Čakavisch-deutsches Lexikon'', vol. 1.-3, Koeln-Vienna, 1979–1983, by Croatian linguists Hraste and Šimunović and German Olesch.

The Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts is currently engaged in editing a multivolume dictionary of the Chakavian literary language, based on the wealth of literature written in Chakavian. More than forty dictionaries of local Chakavian varieties have been published, the largest among them including more than 20,000 words are from locations such as Split, the Gacka Valley, Brač and Vis islands, the towns of Baška on Krk and Bell on Cres.

Other recent titles include Janne Kalsbeek's work on ''The Cakavian Dialect of Orbanici near Minim in Istria'', as well as Keith Langston's ''Cakavian Prosody: The Accentual Patterns of the Cakavian Dialects of Croatian''.

Chakavian media

* Biannual periodical ''"Čakavska rič"'' (Chakavian word), with 34 annual volumes, published from 1967 by the Literal Association ('Književni krug') in Split.
* Annual periodical ''Pannonische Jahrbuch'' with dozen volumes partly in Chakavian of Burgenland Croats, published since 1994 by Pannonisches Institut in Gutterbach (Burgenland, Austria).
* Annual periodical 'Vinodolski zbornik' with a dozen volumes published in Crikvenica, including different texts in the local Chakavian of Vinodol valley.
* Annual singing festival 'Melodije Istre i Kvarnera' takes place every year in different towns of the Istria and Kvarner regions. Performers perform in local Chakavian dialects exclusively.
* A major perpetual program in the Chakavian of Dalmatia is given by the local television stations in Split, Rijeka, and Pula. Other minor half-Chakavian media with temporary Chakavian contents also include the local radio programs in the cities of Split and Rijeka and Krk island radio.

Examples

* (mainland half-Chakavian)
* (vicinity of Labin in eastern Istria)
* (vicinity of Labin in eastern Istria)

Notes

General references

* J. Božanić: ''Čakavska rič,'' vol. 1.- 32., Književni krug Split.
* J. Hamm, M. Hraste, P. Guberina: ''Govor otoka Suska''. Hrvatski dijalektološki zbornik 1, Zagreb 1956.
* M. Hraste, P. Šimunović, R. Olesch: ''Čakavisch-deutsches Lexikon'', Band I-III, Köln-Wien, 1979 - 1983.
* J. Kalsbeek
The Cakavian Dialect of Orbanici near Zminj in Istria
Studies in Slavic and General Linguistics. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. 608 pp
* M. Kranjčević: ''Ričnik gacke čakavšćine''. Čakavski sabor, Otočac 2003.
* K. Langston
Cakavian Prosody: The Accentual Patterns of the Cakavian Dialects of Croatian
Bloomington: Slavica 2006. 314 pp
* I. Lukežić

Izdavački centar Rijeka, Rijeka 1996.
* B. Matoković-Dobrila: ''Ričnik velovaroškega Splita'', Denona, Zagreb 2004.
* A. Roki-Fortunato: ''Libar Viškiga jazika''. Libar Publishing, Toronto 1997.
* P. Šimunović: ''Rječnik bračkih čakavskih govora'', Brevijar, Supetar 2006.
* Z. Turina, A. Šepić-Tomin: ''Rječnik čakavskih izraza - područje Bakarca i Škrljeva'', Riječko književno i naučno društvo, Rijeka 1977.
* N. Velčić: ''Besedar Bejske Tramuntane''. Čakavski sabor i Adamić d.o.o, Cres-Lošinj 2003.

External links

Dictionary of Istrian dialects

{{Authority control

South Slavic languages