Molise Croatian dialect
Encyclopedia
Molise Croatian dialect (also: Croatano, Slavisano, na-našo) is a Croatian
dialect spoken in the province of Campobasso
, in the Molise
Region of southern Italy
, in the village
s of Montemitro
(Mundimitar), Acquaviva Collecroce
(Živavoda Kruč) and San Felice del Molise
(Štifilić). These have approximately 3,000 speakers.
The dialect has been preserved since a group of Croats
emigrated from Dalmatia
abreast of advancing Ottoman Turks
. The residents of these villages speak a Western Štokavian dialect, with Ikavian reflex of yat
. The Molise Croats
along with the Bunjevci
and Janjevci
have preserved their ancient Croat identity hundreds of miles from their ancient homeland. Some speakers call themselves Zlavi or "Harvati" and call their language simply na našo ("our language").
, abandoned because of the plague. Originally the area inhabited by Slavs was much wider than today. Because these people have migrated away from the rest of their kinsmen so long ago, their diaspora language
is somewhat distinct from the Croatian Štokavian & Cakavian Ikavian idioms spoken at the other side of the Adriatic.
The language was preserved until today only in the aforementioned three villages, although several villages in Molise and Abruzzo region are aware of their Slavic
and Croat ancestry. The existence of this Croat colony
was unknown outside Italy until 1855 when Medo Pucić
, a linguist from Dubrovnik
, during one of his journeys in Italy overheard a tailor in Naples
speaking with his wife in a language very similar to Pucić's own. The tailor then told him that he came from the village of Kruč, then part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies
. Subsequently the Gajica, the modern Croatian alphabet
, was adopted to the language.
The language is highly Italianized. As has been mentioned above, the literati
generally borrow forgotten words from modern (ijekavian - the dialect is ikavian) Croatian, but the obligatory Italian translations are seen to follow these words in print. It also retains many archaic
features. As the colony was established before the discovery of the Americas
, all the names of animals and plants introduced from the Americas are borrowed from Italian or created from whole cloth.
The language is taught in primary schools and the signs in villages are bilingual.
Mo prosič solite saki dan
ma što činiš, ne govoreš maj
je funia dan, je počela noča,
maneštra se mrzli za te čeka.
Letu vlase e tvoja mat
gleda vane za te vit.
Boli život za sta zgoro,
ma samo mat te hoče dobro.
Sin moj!
Nimam već suze za još plaka
nimam već riče za govorat.
Srce se guli za te misli
što ti prodava, oni ke sve te išće!
Palako govoru, čelkadi saki dan,
ke je dola droga na vi grad.
Sin moj!
Tvoje oč, bihu toko lipe,
sada jesu mrtve,
Boga ja molim, da ti živiš
droga ja hočem da ti zabiš,
doma te čekam, ke se vrniš,
Solite ke mi prosiš,
kupiš paradis, ma smrtu platiš.
Croatian language
Croatian is the collective name for the standard language and dialects spoken by Croats, principally in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serbian province of Vojvodina and other neighbouring countries...
dialect spoken in the province of Campobasso
Province of Campobasso
The Province of Campobasso is a province in the Molise region of Italy. Its capital is the city of Campobasso.It has an area of 2,909 km², and a total population of 230,692...
, in the Molise
Molise
Molise is a region of Southern Italy, the second smallest of the regions. It was formerly part of the region of Abruzzi e Molise and now a separate entity...
Region of southern Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, in the village
Village
A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet with the population ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand , Though often located in rural areas, the term urban village is also applied to certain urban neighbourhoods, such as the West Village in Manhattan, New...
s of Montemitro
Montemitro
Montemitro is a small town and comune in the province of Campobasso in the Molise region of Italy, near the Trigno river....
(Mundimitar), Acquaviva Collecroce
Acquaviva Collecroce
Acquaviva Collecroce is a small town and comune in the province of Campobasso, in the Molise region of southern Italy, between the Biferno and Trigno rivers....
(Živavoda Kruč) and San Felice del Molise
San Felice del Molise
San Felice del Molise is a small town and comune in the province of Campobasso in the Molise region of Italy, near the Trigno river....
(Štifilić). These have approximately 3,000 speakers.
The dialect has been preserved since a group of Croats
Croats
Croats are a South Slavic ethnic group mostly living in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and nearby countries. There are around 4 million Croats living inside Croatia and up to 4.5 million throughout the rest of the world. Responding to political, social and economic pressure, many Croats have...
emigrated from Dalmatia
Dalmatia
Dalmatia is a historical region on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea. It stretches from the island of Rab in the northwest to the Bay of Kotor in the southeast. The hinterland, the Dalmatian Zagora, ranges from fifty kilometers in width in the north to just a few kilometers in the south....
abreast of advancing Ottoman Turks
Ottoman Turks
The Ottoman Turks were the Turkish-speaking population of the Ottoman Empire who formed the base of the state's military and ruling classes. Reliable information about the early history of Ottoman Turks is scarce, but they take their Turkish name, Osmanlı , from the house of Osman I The Ottoman...
. The residents of these villages speak a Western Štokavian dialect, with Ikavian reflex of yat
Yat
Yat or Jat is the thirty-second letter of the old Cyrillic alphabet. Its name in Old Church Slavonic is jěd’ or iad’ . In the common scientific Latin transliteration for old Slavic languages, the letter is represented by e with caron: .The yat represented a Common Slavic long vowel...
. The Molise Croats
Molise Croats
Molise Croats live in the Molise region of Italy in the villages Acquaviva Collecroce , San Felice del Molise , Montemitro and elsewhere. In these three villages they are a majority. There are about 5,000 speakers of the Molise Croatian dialect...
along with the Bunjevci
Bunjevci
Bunjevci are a South Slavic community and ethnic group living mostly in the Bačka region of Serbia and southern Hungary...
and Janjevci
Janjevci
Janjevci are Croatian inhabitants of the Kosovo town of Janjevo and surrounding villages, located near Pristina as well as villages centered on Letnica near Vitina ....
have preserved their ancient Croat identity hundreds of miles from their ancient homeland. Some speakers call themselves Zlavi or "Harvati" and call their language simply na našo ("our language").
History
The inhabitants of these villages would say that their ancestors came Z onu banu mora ("From the other side of the sea"), and inhabited villages in Molise and AbruzzoAbruzzo
Abruzzo is a region in Italy, its western border lying less than due east of Rome. Abruzzo borders the region of Marche to the north, Lazio to the west and south-west, Molise to the south-east, and the Adriatic Sea to the east...
, abandoned because of the plague. Originally the area inhabited by Slavs was much wider than today. Because these people have migrated away from the rest of their kinsmen so long ago, their diaspora language
Diaspora language
The term diaspora language, coined in the 1980s, is a sociolinguistic idea referring to a variety of language spoken in a place of migration. For example, the great number of Hindi speakers in the United Kingdom has produced a strain of the language unlike that spoken on the Indian subcontinent...
is somewhat distinct from the Croatian Štokavian & Cakavian Ikavian idioms spoken at the other side of the Adriatic.
The language was preserved until today only in the aforementioned three villages, although several villages in Molise and Abruzzo region are aware of their Slavic
Slavic peoples
The Slavic people are an Indo-European panethnicity living in Eastern Europe, Southeast Europe, North Asia and Central Asia. The term Slavic represents a broad ethno-linguistic group of people, who speak languages belonging to the Slavic language family and share, to varying degrees, certain...
and Croat ancestry. The existence of this Croat colony
Colony
In politics and history, a colony is a territory under the immediate political control of a state. For colonies in antiquity, city-states would often found their own colonies. Some colonies were historically countries, while others were territories without definite statehood from their inception....
was unknown outside Italy until 1855 when Medo Pucić
Medo Pucic
Medo Pucić, also known as Orsat Pucić, was a writer and politician from Dubrovnik, at the time in the Austro-Hungarian Kingdom of Dalmatia, who was the first Catholic native of Dubrovnik to declare himself a Serb, believing that the religion was irrelevant for ethnic affiliation, contrary to the...
, a linguist from Dubrovnik
Dubrovnik
Dubrovnik is a Croatian city on the Adriatic Sea coast, positioned at the terminal end of the Isthmus of Dubrovnik. It is one of the most prominent tourist destinations on the Adriatic, a seaport and the centre of Dubrovnik-Neretva county. Its total population is 42,641...
, during one of his journeys in Italy overheard a tailor in Naples
Naples
Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...
speaking with his wife in a language very similar to Pucić's own. The tailor then told him that he came from the village of Kruč, then part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies
Kingdom of the Two Sicilies
The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, commonly known as the Two Sicilies even before formally coming into being, was the largest and wealthiest of the Italian states before Italian unification...
. Subsequently the Gajica, the modern Croatian alphabet
Croatian alphabet
Gaj's Latin alphabet is a variant of the Latin script used for Croatian language. It was devised by Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj in 1835, based on Jan Hus's Czech alphabet....
, was adopted to the language.
The language is highly Italianized. As has been mentioned above, the literati
Literati
Literati may refer to:*Intellectuals or those who read and comment on literature*The scholar-bureaucrats or literati of imperial China**Literati painting, also known as the Southern School of painting, developed by Chinese literati...
generally borrow forgotten words from modern (ijekavian - the dialect is ikavian) Croatian, but the obligatory Italian translations are seen to follow these words in print. It also retains many archaic
Archaism
In language, an archaism is the use of a form of speech or writing that is no longer current. This can either be done deliberately or as part of a specific jargon or formula...
features. As the colony was established before the discovery of the Americas
Americas
The Americas, or America , are lands in the Western hemisphere, also known as the New World. In English, the plural form the Americas is often used to refer to the landmasses of North America and South America with their associated islands and regions, while the singular form America is primarily...
, all the names of animals and plants introduced from the Americas are borrowed from Italian or created from whole cloth.
The language is taught in primary schools and the signs in villages are bilingual.
Features
- The analytic do + genitive replaces the synthetic independent genitive.
- do superseded od.
- Slavic verb aspect is preserved, except in the past tense imperfective verbs are attested only in the Slavic imperfect (bihu, they were), and perfective verbs only in the perfect (je izaša, he has come out). There is no colloquial imperfect in the modern West South Slavic languages.
- Slavic conjunctions superseded by Italian or local ones: ke (Cr. što, what, also ke - Cr. da, that); e, oš (Cr i, and); ma (Cr. ali, no, but); si (Cr. ako, if).
- An indefinite article is in regular use: na, often written 'na.
- Structural changes in genders. Notably, njevog does not agree with the possessor's gender (Cr. njegov or njezin, his or her).
- The perfective enclitic is tightly bound to the verb and always stands before it: je izaša (Cr. facul. je izašao or izašao je).
Sample
An anonymous poem (reprinted in Hrvatske Novine: Tajednik Gradišćanskih Hrvatov, winner of a competition in Molise):- SIN MOJ
Mo prosič solite saki dan
ma što činiš, ne govoreš maj
je funia dan, je počela noča,
maneštra se mrzli za te čeka.
Letu vlase e tvoja mat
gleda vane za te vit.
Boli život za sta zgoro,
ma samo mat te hoče dobro.
Sin moj!
Nimam već suze za još plaka
nimam već riče za govorat.
Srce se guli za te misli
što ti prodava, oni ke sve te išće!
Palako govoru, čelkadi saki dan,
ke je dola droga na vi grad.
Sin moj!
Tvoje oč, bihu toko lipe,
sada jesu mrtve,
Boga ja molim, da ti živiš
droga ja hočem da ti zabiš,
doma te čekam, ke se vrniš,
Solite ke mi prosiš,
kupiš paradis, ma smrtu platiš.
Dictionaries
- From: Josip Lisac: Dva moliškohrvatska rječnika, Mogućnosti 10/12, 2000.
- Walter Breu-Giovanni Piccoli (con aiuto di S. Marčec), Dizionario croatomolisano di Acquaviva-Collecroce, 2000, Campobasso 2000
- Ag. Piccoli-Antonio Samartino, Dizionario dell' idioma croato-molisano di Montemitro/Rječnik moliškohrvatskih govora Mundimitra, Matica hrvatska Mundimitar-Zagreb, 2000.
- Giovanni Piccoli: Lessico del dialetto di Acquaviva-Collecroce, Roma, 1967
- Božidar Vidov: Rječnik ikavsko-štokavskih govora molizanskih Hrvata u srednjoj Italiji, Mundimitar, Štifilić, Kruč, Toronto, 1972.
- Tatjana Crisman: Dall' altra parte del mare. Le colonie croate del Molise, Roma, 1980
- Angelo Genova: Ko jesmo bolje: Ko bihmo, Vasto, 1990.
Sources
- Aranza, Josip (1892), Woher die südslavischen Colonien in Süditalien (Archiv für slavische Philologie, XIV, pp. 78–82, Berlin 1892)
- Badurina, Teodoro (1950), Rotas Opera Tenet Arepo Sator (Roma, 1950)
- Barone, Charles, La parlata croata di Acquaviva Collecroce. Studio fonetico e fonologico, Firenze, Leo S. Olschki Editore, MCMXCV, p. 206 (Accademia toscana di scienze e lettere »La Colombaria«. »Studi CXLVI)
- Breu, W. (1990), Sprache und Sprachverhalten in den slavischen Dörfern des Molise (Süditalien). In: W. BREU (a cura di), Slavistische Linguistik 1989. München, 35 65
- Breu, W. (1998), Romanisches Adstrat im Moliseslavischen. In: Die Welt der Slaven 43, 339-354
- Breu, W. / Piccoli, G. con la collaborazione di Snježana Marčec (2000), Dizionario croato molisano di Acquaviva Collecroce. Dizionario plurilingue della lingua slava della minoranza di provenienza dalmata di Acquaviva Collecroce in Provincia di Campobasso. Dizionario, registri, grammatica, testi. Campobasso
- Breu, W. (2003a), Bilingualism and linguistic interference in the Slavic-Romance contact area of Molise (Southern Italy). In: R. ECKARDT et al. (a cura di), Words in Time. Diacronic Semantics from Different Points of View. Berlin/New York, 351-373
- Breu, W. a cura di (2005), L'influsso dell'italiano sulla grammatica delle lingue minoritarie. Università della Calabria. In questo volume: W. Breu, Il sistema degli articoli nello slavo molisano: eccezione a un universale tipologico, 111-139; A. Marra, Mutamenti e persistenze nelle forme di futuro dello slavo molisano, 141-166; G. Piccoli, L'influsso dell'italiano nella sintassi del periodo del croato (slavo) molisano, 167-175.
- Gliosca, N. (2004). Poesie di un vecchio quaderno (a cura di G. Piscicelli). In: Komoštre/Kamastra. Rivista bilingue di cultura e attualità delle minoranze linguistiche degli Arbëreshë e Croati del Molise 8/3, 8-9.
- Heršak, Emil (1982), Hrvati u talijanskoj pokrajini Molise", Teme o iseljeništvu. br. 11, Zagreb: Centar za istraživanje migracija, 1982, 49 str. lit 16.
- Hraste, Mate (1964), Govori jugozapadne Istre (Zagreb, 1964)
- Muljačić, Žarko (1996), Charles Barone, La parlata croata di Acquaviva Collecroce (189-190), »Čakavska rič« XXIV (1996) • br. 1-2 • Split • siječanj - prosinac 1996.
- Piccoli A. / Sammartino A. (2000), Dizionario croato-molisano di Montemitro, Fondazione “Agostina Piccoli”, Montemitro – Matica hrvatska, Zagreb
- Reissmüller, Johann Georg (1969) Slavenske riječi u Apeninima (Frankfurter Allgemeine, n. 212 del 13.11.1969
- Rešetar, M. (1997), Le colonie serbocroate nell'Italia meridionale. A cura di W. Breu e M. Gardenghi (traduzione italiana dell'originale tedesco Die Serbokroatischen Kolonien Süditaliens, Wien 1911 con prefazione, note e bibliografia aggiornata). Campobasso
- Sammartino A. (2004), Grammatica della lingua croatomolisana, Fondazione “Agostina Piccoli”, Montemitro – Profil international, Zagreb
- Žanić, Ivo, Nemojte zabit naš lipi jezik!, Nedjeljna Dalmacija, Split, 18. ožujka 1984. (18. marzo 1984)
External links
- Porijeklo prezimena o Moliski hrvati u Mundimitru/Origins of surnames of Croats in Mundimitar
- UNESCO Red Book on endangered languages and dialects: Europe
- Schede sulle minoranze tutelate dalla legge 482/1999 Minority languages in Italy (site of University in Udine, in Italian)
- Le Croate en Italie
- Molisian Slavic at the University of Konstanz (Germany)
- Download of the Italian Version (1997 © Walter Breu) of Milan Rešetar's Book (1911) Vjesnik Josip Lisac: Monumentalni rječnik moliških Hrvata, Jan 9 2001 Autonome Region Trentino-Südtirol Sprachminderheiten in Italien CGH - Gradišćansko-hrvatski Centar - Burgenländisch-kroatisches Zentrum Wörterbuch der Molisekroaten (Italien) wurde Donnerstag in Wien vorgestellt
- Vijenac 186/2001 Posebnost moliške jezične baštine - Dizionario dell'idioma croato-molisano di Montemitro — Rječnik moliškohrvatskog govora Mundimitra predstavljen