Observations on Croatian as a Heritage Language Across Four Continents

Abstract

Of the approximately 6.67 million Croatian speakers worldwide, about 1.6 million are located in the Croatian diaspora, from Latin America to Western Europe, North America, and Australia. A multi-site project on Croatian as it is spoken in the diaspora was initiated in 2015 which encompassed ten corpora of linguistic data collected in nine different countries across four continents. Backgrounded by an overview of previous research into the speech of Croatian emigrants, this paper defines and explains the notion of ‘Croatian as a heritage language’. Our focus then turns to the speakers themselves, and we draw on a combined sample of corpora that consist of recorded speech samples gained from 300 Croatian-origin emigrants. These included first-, second- and third-generation speakers. We provide an overview of features in Croatian as a heritage language regarding the following four areas: pragmatics; lexicon; calques and loan translation; and code-switching. In our presentation of examples from all ten samples we compare data between countries and vintages of migration, and between speakers of older and younger generations. In our examination of examples, we also compare these with forms used in varieties of Croatian that are spoken in the homeland, both non-standard and standard. Our observations provide a contemporary and cross-national description of Croatian as a heritage language. At the same time, we position heritage Croatian within the field of contact linguistics research