Burgenland-Croatian – a language in contact – First signs of language decay
Burgenland-Croatian – a language in contact – First signs of language decay

Summary/Abstract: Burgenland-Croatian has recently been standardized more or less parallel to the system of the standard language of Croatia, without reflecting all the changes described above. I consciously put my focus on the spoken language, because it significantly differs from the Burgenland-Croatian standard. We could even say that we find some kind of diglossia in Burgenland. TV, radio and newspapers are in the standard language, whereas nobody speaks like that. The standard language tries to conserve some archaic features of Burgenland-Croatian1 , tries to be understandable for all speakers of Burgenland-Croatian, although we have 3 different dialects, and is getting closer and closer to the Croatia standard in order to escape the strong German influence (de Cillia/Dressler 2006). The question is whether this makes sense, even though we know how important it is for a national minority to have its own standard language. Unfortunately we already find a lot of signs indicative of language decay in Burgenland-Croatian, apart from the shrinking number of speakers.

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