南モラヴィアのクロアチア語 言語の維持と社会的背景に関する一考察
Croatian in South Moravia: Language Maintenance and Sociolinguistic Circumstances

Summary/Abstract: This paper describes the linguistic features of Moravian Croatian (abbreviated to Mo- Cro), a regional variation of the South Slavic Čakavian dialect once spoken in the southernmost 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 *ě 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.

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