CHAKAVIAN DIALECT

'Chakavian' ('Čakavian', ''čakavski'') dialect is a dialect of the Croatian language. The name of the dialect stems from the interrogatory pronoun for "what", which is "ča" in Čakavian. Čakavian is nowadays spoken mainly in Istria, on the Adriatic sea coast, the Dalmatian littoral and the islands.
Čakavian can be classified as a dialect of the Central South Slavic diasystem, generally referred from the Croatian language but exclusively a Croatian dialect. Probably the only valid argument for the categorisation into the wider group would be that interference of Čakavian with the shtokavian dialect has given rise to a ''Šćakavian'' mixture, a few subdialects spoken in western and eastern Bosnia by Croats and Bosniaks, and recorded in monuments of medieval (12th–15th century) and Counter-Reformation (17th century) literacy and literature: tombstone inscriptions, legal documents and Catholic polemical and liturgical works. However, the Čakavian dialect sensu stricto is now spoken by Croats only.
The language used by the Croats of Northern Burgenland is also Čakavian.

Contents

History

Characteristics

Čakavian literary language

Example

History

Čakavian is the oldest Croatian dialect that had made 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. Proto-Čakavian can be traced back to 1100 and Baška tablet.
Initially, the Čakavian dialect covered a much wider area than today - the major part of central and southern Croatia, as well as western Bosnia and Herzegovina. During and after the Ottoman intrusion and subsequent warfare (15th-18th centuries), the Čakavian area has become greatly reduced, so it is now spoken in a much smaller area, as described above.
In more than eight centuries Čakavian has, as is to be expected, undergone many phonetic, morphological and syntactical changes. Yet, contemporary dialectologists are particularly interested in it since it has retained an accentuation system characterized by a proto-Slavic new rising accent and the old position of stress.

Characteristics

The Čakavian dialect is divided along several criteria. According to the reflex of the old Slavic phoneme yat (which is explained on Shtokavian dialect page) it is categorized as:
# ekavian (northeastern Istria, Rijeka)
# ikavian-ekavian (islands Krk, Pag, Lika region)
# ikavian (western Istria, islands Brač, Hvar, Vis, Korčula, Pelješac)
# ijekavian (Lastovo island)
Other linguists have combined phonetic and phonological criteria, resulting in 6 groups of subdialects:
# Buzet dialect
# southwest Istrian or Štokavian-Čakavian
# northern Čakavian or Ekavian Čakavian
# middle Čakavian or Ikavian-Ekavian
# southern Čakavian or Ikavian Čakavian
# Lastovo dialect or Ijekavian Čakavian
There is no unanimous opinion on the set of traits a dialect has to possess to be classified as čakavian (rather than admixture with štokavian or kajkavian), but the following traits are frequently encountered:

★ interrogatory pronoun is "ča" or "zač";

★ old accentuation-3 accents;

★ phonological features that give /a/ for old Slavic phonemes in characteristic positions: "language" is ''jazik'' in Čakavian and ''jezik'' in Štokavian;

★ contracted aorist tense;

★ "j" where Štokavian is characterized by "đ", and Bulgarian "žd": for "between", Čakavian ''meju'', Štokavian ''među'', and Bulgarian ''meždu'';

★ "m" shifts to "n" at the end of words: Standard Croatian ''volim'' ("I love"), ''sam'' ("I am"), ''selom'' ("village" - Instrumental case) become ''volin'', ''san'', ''selon''.
Due to its archaic nature and impressive corpus of developed early vernacular literary, the Čakavian dialect has attracted numerous dialectologists who have meticulously documented its nuances, so that Čakavian is among the best described Slavic dialects. The representative modern work in the field is ''Čakavisch-deutsches Lexikon'', 1.-3, Koln-Vienna, 1979-1983, authored by Croatian linguists Hraste and Šimunović and German Olesch. More — Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts is currently engaged in editing a multivoluminous dictionary of the Čakavian literary language, based on the wealth of literature written in čakavian.

Čakavian literary language

Since Čakavian was the first Croatian dialect to extricate 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.
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 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 like 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), is essentially a mixed idiom; Štokavian-Čakavian.
The most famous Čakavian author is Marko Marulić. Also, the first Croatian dictionary, authored by Faust Vrančić, is mainly Čakavian in its form.
The tradition of Čakavian literary language had died out in the 18th century, but it has helped shape 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. In the end of the eighties in Istria there began a special sub-genre of rock music "Ča-val" ''(Ča 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.

Example

''Ča je, je, tako je navik bilo, ča će bit, će bit, a nekako već će bit!''