Tvorbeni oblici etnika otoka Brača
Formation of Demonyms of the Island of Brač

Author(s): Josip Lasić, Magdalena Nigoević
Subject(s): Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, South Slavic Languages
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: demonyms; formation of demonyms; dialect; local speech of island Brač
Summary/Abstract: The term demonym (cro. etnik) is used in the Croatian linguistic bibliography to denote „the name of a person (a male or a female) living or having origins in an inhabited place (oyconym), region, country, state and continent“ (Babić, 1976: 145). Previous researches on the formation of demonyms in the standard (Barić, 1997; Silić and Pranjković, 2005) and some regional varieties (Šimunović, 2006; Čilaš Šimpraga and Kurtović Budja, 2009) of the Croatian language suggest that they are most frequently formed by the means of suffixation. Namely, 86 suffixes for male and 21 suffixes for female gender have been identified in the standard Croatian language. The aim of this paper is to present and analyse a corpus of demonyms of the Central Dalmatian island Brač. The corpus is a result of a field research conducted in September 2018 and March 2019. The research shows that there are 22 inhabited places on the island of Brač whose names were used to obtain about forty demonyms for each gender. For the purposes of this paper, they were subsequently recorded, verified, listed and analysed in terms of the type of their formation. Since the analysis of demonym formation revealed instances of multi-layered language variation, this paper will present some special features of local speeches recorded directly on the spot through the examples of interesting types of formation of demonyms for both genders. The aim of this paper is, therefore, two-fold: to preserve the demonyms from oblivion (since some of the places on the islands of Brač may soon be abandoned and uninhabited), and to systematize the demonyms of Brač in line with the models of demonym formation established for the standard Croatian language.

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