Many years of traffic isolation of the town of Pag, which is situated within a
deep bay in the central part of the Island of Pag, resulted in preservation of many
traditions, especially "cakavizm” as a form of cakavian dialect.
Although the official family names had been recorded very early (in the year of
1399), family nicknames had developed, too, out of necessity and in order to individualize
and to differentiate many families who had the same family names.
From the language point of view, family nicknames in Pag are not dialectal patronymic
variants, but rather lexically new words that substitute exchange patronymics
in everyday’s informal use. Like all onomastic lexical words, nicknames too
belong to the basic language expressive elements of the spoken language of Pag,
and live according to its rules, preserving its semantic content and lexical meaning.
Family nicknames of Pag have been formed mainly on the bases of their Christian
names, occupation, character, physical or mental characteristics of an individual.
However, there are also nonsemantic nicknames that have originated from
erroneously pronounced Italian words; some of the nicknames lost their meaning
due to phonetic changes which then caused the loss of the initial morpheme structure
of the words.
With regard to the origin motivation, nicknames as language categories have the
form of Christian or family names, and are most often monosyllabic nouns or substantiated
other words, because by use of nouns semantic structure of the content is
best expressed.
The formative structure of family nicknames of Pag opens those formative elements
which are characteristic of cakavian dialect with an obvious influence of the
neighbouring stokavian spoken language.
From the structural point ov view, it is possible to place them into three groups:
unchanged, changed and complex nicknames.
Unchanged nicknames consist of monosyllabic words.
To the group of changed nicknames is belong most of those that have the form
of a family names, or have originated from Christian names.
There are very few complex nicknames with distinguishable parts.
All nicknames have feminine and masculine gender forms, and regularly have
both singular and plural forms. Singular forms may be declined as nouns of masculine
or feminine gender. Plural forms are declined as adjectives according to the
pronominal declention, showing their belonging to specific families.
Regardless of the existence of the basis and their root morpheme, which could
have, as the meaningful lexeme bearer, being formed under the influence of the
Italian language, the family nicknames of Pag, as derivatives, are entirely formed
according to the rules of the Croatian language, because Pag has always belonged
to the Croatian linguistic corpus
