| Chakavian | ||||
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| čakavica | ||||
| Pronunciation | ||||
| Spoken in | Croatia | |||
| Native speakers | ca. 660,000 (2001) | |||
| Language family |
Indo-European
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| Language codes | ||||
| ISO 639-3 | – | |||
| Linguist List | hrv-cha | |||
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Distribution of Čakavian
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Chakavian or Čakavian ( /tʃɑːˈkɑːviən/; Croatian: čakavski, proper name: čakavica or čakavština, own name: čokovski, čakavski, čekavski) is a dialect of the Croatian language. The name stems from the word for "what?", which is "ča" (or "ca") in Čakavian. Čakavian is nowadays spoken mainly in the northeastern Adriatic: in Istria, Kvarner Gulf, in most Adriatic islands, and in the interior valley Gacka, more sporadically in the Dalmatian littoral and central Croatia.
Chakavian was the basis for the first literary standard of the Croats. Today, it is spoken almost entirely within Croatia's borders, apart from the Burgenland Croats in Austria and in Hungary.
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Čakavian is the oldest written Croatian dialect that had made a visible appearance in legal documents - as early as 1275 ("Istrian land survey")[1] and 1288 ("Vinodol codex"), the predominantly vernacular Čakavian is recorded, mixed with elements of Church Slavic. Archaic Čakavian can be traced back to 1105 in the Baška tablet. All these and other early Čakavian texts up to 17th century are mostly written in Glagolitic alphabet.
Initially, the Čakavian dialect covered a much wider area than today including about 2/3 of medieval Croatia: the major part of central and southern Croatia southwards of Kupa and westwards of Una river, as well as western and southwestern Bosnia and Herzegovina. During and after the Ottoman intrusion and subsequent warfare (15th-18th centuries), the Čakavian area has become greatly reduced and in the Croatian mainlands it has recently been almost entirely replaced by Štokavian, so it is now spoken in a much smaller coastal area than indicated above.
As expected, in over nine centuries Čakavian has undergone many phonetic, morphological and syntactical changes chiefly in turbulent mainlands, and less in isolated islands. Yet, contemporary dialectologists are particularly interested in it since it has retained the old accentuation system characterized by a Proto-Slavic new rising accent and the old position of stress, and also numerous Proto-Slavic and some Proto-Indo-European archaisms in its vocabulary.
Čakavian in its actual use is the rarest Croatian dialect being spoken only by 12% Croats. It is now mostly reduced in southwestern Croatia along the eastern Adriatic: Adriatic islands, and sporadically in the mainland coast, with rare inland enclaves up to central Croatia, and minor enclaves in Austria and Montenegro.
The basic phonology of Chakavian, with representation in Gaj's Latin alphabet and IPA, is as follows:
| Labial | Alveolar | Post- alveolar |
Palatal | Velar | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m m |
n n |
ɲ nj |
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| Plosive | p b p b |
t d t d |
c ć |
k ɡ k g |
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| Affricate | ts c |
tʃ č |
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| Fricative | f f |
s z s z |
ʃ ʒ š ž |
x h |
|
| Approximant | ʋ v |
l l |
j j |
||
| Trill | r r |
The Čakavian dialect is divided along several criteria. According to the reflex of the Common Slavic phoneme yat */ě/, there are four accents:
Obsolete literature commonly refers to Ikavian–Ekavian dialects as "mixed", which is a misleading term because the yat reflexes were governed by Meyer-Jakubinskij's law.
According to their prosodical (accentual) features, Čakavian dialects are divided into the following groups:
Using a combination of accentual and phonological criteria, Croatian dialectologist Dalibor Brozović divided the Čakavian dialect system into six (sub)dialects:
| Name | Reflex of Common Slavic yat | Distribution |
|---|---|---|
| Buzet dialect | Ekavian (closed e) | Northern Istria |
| Southwest Istrian dialect | Ikavian | Western Istria |
| Northern Čakavian | Ekavian | Northeast Istria, Istra, Kastav, Rijeka, Cres |
| Middle Čakavian | Ikavian–Ekavian | Dugi otok, Kornati, Lošinj, Krk, Rab, Pag, Vinodol, Ogulin, Brinje, Otočac, Duga Resa |
| Southern Čakavian | Ikavian | Korčula, Pelješac, Brač, Hvar, Vis, Šolta, outskirts of Split and Zadar |
| Southeastern Čakavian | jekavski | Lastovo, Janjina on Pelješac, Bigova on the south of Montenegro |
There is no unanimous opinion on the set of traits a dialect has to possess to be classified as Čakavian (rather than its admixture with Štokavian or Kajkavian); the following traits were mostly proposed:
Besides the usual Čakavian (with typical pronoun "ča"), in some Adriatic islands and in eastern Istra another special variant is also spoken which lacks most palatals, with other parallel deviations called "tsakavism" (cakavizam):
The largest area of tsakavism is in eastern Istra at Labin, Rabac and a dozen nearby villages; minor mainland enclaves are the towns Bakar and Trogir. Tsakavism is also frequent in Adriatic islands: part of Lošinj and nearby islets, Baška in Krk, Pag town, the western parts of Brač (Milna), Hvar town, and subentire Vis with adjacent islets.
The first two features are similar to Mazurzenie, occurring in a few dialects of Polish, and Tsokanye, occurring in the Old Novgorod dialect of Old East Slavic.
Since Čakavian was the first Croatian dialect to emerge from the Church Slavic matrix, both literacy and literature in this dialect abound with numerous texts - from legal and liturgical to literary: lyric and epic poetry, drama, novel in verses, as well as philological works that contain Čakavian word-stock. Čakavian was the main public and official language in medieval Croatia from 13th to 16th century.
Monuments of literacy began to appear in the 11th and 12th centuries, and artistic literature in the 15th. While there were two zones of Čakavian, northern and southern (both mainly along the Adriatic coast and islands, with centres like Senj, Zadar, Split, Hvar, Korčula), there is enough unity in the idiom to allow us to speak of one Čakavian literary language with minor regional variants. This language by far surpassed the position of a simple vernacular dialect and strongly influenced other Croatian literary dialects, particularly Štokavian: the first Štokavian texts such as the Vatican Croatian Prayer Book, dated to 1400, are transcriptions from a Čakavian original. The early Štokavian literary and philological output, mainly from Dubrovnik (1500–1600) up to Džore Držić, was essentially a mixed Štokavian–Čakavian idiom, mostly similar to the Jekavian Čakavian of Lastovo and Janjina.
The most famous early Čakavian author is Marko Marulić in 15th/16th century. Also, the first Croatian dictionary, authored by Faust Vrančić, is mostly Čakavian in its form. The tradition of the Čakavian literary language had declined in the 18th century, but it has helped shape the standard Croatian language in many ways (chiefly in morphology and phonetics), and Čakavian dialectal poetry is still a vital part of Croatian literature.
The most prominent representatives of Čakavian poetry in the 20th century are Vladimir Nazor and Drago Gervais. At the end of the 1980s in Istria there began a special sub-genre of pop-rock music "Ča-val" (Cha wave); artists that were part of this scene used the Čakavian dialect in their lyrics, and often fused rock music with traditional Istra-Kvarner music.
Due to its archaic nature, early medieval development, and impressive corpus of vernacular literacy, the typical Čakavian dialect has attracted numerous dialectologists who have meticulously documented its nuances, so that Čakavian was among the best described Slavic dialects, but its atypical tsakavism was partly neglected and less studied. The representative modern work in the field is Čakavisch-deutsches Lexikon, vol. 1.-3, Koeln-Vienna, 1979–1983, by Croatian linguists Hraste and Šimunović and German Olesch.
The Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts is currently engaged in editing a multivolume dictionary of the Čakavian literary language, based on the wealth of literature written in Čakavian. So far one published more than forty dictionaries of local Čakavian tongues, the largest among them including more than 20,000 words are from locations such as Split town, Gacka valley, Brač and Vis islands, Baška in Krk, and Beli in Cres.
Other recent titles include Janne Kalsbeek's work on The Cakavian Dialect of Orbanici near Zminj in Istria, as well as Keith Langston's Cakavian Prosody: The Accentual Patterns of the Cakavian Dialects of Croatian.
In Yugoslavia during the twentieth century, the archaic Čakavian was mostly restricted in private communication, poetry and folklore. Through the recent regional democratizing and cultural revival starting in the 1990s, Čakavians partly regained their former half-public positions chiefly in the Istra peninsula and coastal towns, being now presented there in some modern public media, for example: