The article attempts to consider issues related to the presence of various language varieties in Croatian literature – general/standard (native and foreign), regional (dialects, regiolects), social (sociolects). Focusing primarily on artistic narrative prose, the author tries to show how the heritage of centuries‑old multilingualism in the culture of Croatia translated into various stylistic phenomena, how it evolves and what consequences it may have not only for the language itself, but also for cultural phenomena. Thanks to this approach, an attempt is made to highlight the circumstances related to the choice of the Shtokavian dialect as the literary language in the 19th century.

The subject of the article is the Italian influence on Croatian phonotactics. Selected issues concerning the distribution of consonants from the Čakavian dialect and na našu – the dialect of Croatian villages in Italy – are discussed in the article.

Notes about a handbook of Italian grammar by a Croatian philologist Dragutin Antun Parčić – A handbook of Italian grammar, written in Croatian by Croatian philologist Parčić, confirms that in the past educated Croatian-speaking people were bilingual and at the same time it proves that lower classes aimed to study Italian as well. The paper analyses the functionality and appropriateness of topics presented in the Parčić manuscript because it is obvious that the author was keen to help his Croatian-speaking students in the acquisition of Italian.

The article deals with 8 etymologies of dialectal lexemes (along with their variant forms and derivatives) in three dialects of Croatian: drlo and drlog ‘mess, old things scattered’, krtog ‘lair; mess’, madvina (medvina) ‘lair, den’, mlađ / mlaj ‘silt’, sporak / sporǝk ‘hill, slope’, tušek ‘empty grain; undeveloped corn cob’, zavet i zavetje ‘sheltered place’, žužnja ‘leather shoelace; string; ribbon; belt’.

In the modern corpus of Croatian anthroponyms there are 30 personal names with the root bog (‛god’). An abundance of both published and unpublished historical sources used in this research allowed the authors to create a corpus of personal names suitable for the comparative analysis of frequency and incidence in historical sources. The continuity of the use of the root bog among Croats is presented through the analysis of historical anthroponymic records (from the oldest originating in the 11th century, to contemporary sources). The oldest available sources attest to the onset of interference and the blending of Slavic and Romanic ethnicities, foremost in coastal Dalmatian city communes. A limited frequency of these personal names was detected in the 16th century. The factors that led to this situation are not only connected to the decisions of the Council of Trent, which recommended general usage of Christian names, but can also be attributed to historical circumstances (incursion of Ottomans, subsequent migrations). Most of the 16th century attestations pertain to areas with a mixed Christian and Muslim population. In border areas, where Western states shared Eastern borders with the Ottoman Empire, the analysed attestations were quite rare. Due to constant migrations from the contact zones and the Ottoman Empire towards the interior of the Hungarian-Croatian Kingdom, these personal names were able to ”survive” the early modern period. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, usage of folk names was more frequent, most probably as a consequence of the process of Croatian national revival.

The purpose of this article is to show the function and frequency of Turkish loanwords in modern Croatian language based on a questionnaire survey. Respondents were diversified in age, gender nad origin. The subject of analysis were stylistically marked loanwords that have fallen victim to a puristic language policy pursued by the Croatian linguists in popular language guides, especially in the 1990s. As survey results show, these activities aimed at removing Turkish loanwords from Croatian languague proved to be ineffective. Most of these words are still being used by the Croats simultaneously with the native synonyms. Puristic view declared by some of the respondents does not affect the usage of the Turkish loanwords in unofficial situations.

One of the diffi culties of Slavic etymology which also occur in works devoted to the reconstruction of Proto-Slavic vocabulary, is the problem associated with distinguishing words, with an identical or similar sound, of native origin, and borrowings. The article considers four situations of this kind. The reconstruction of the allegedly Proto-Slavic word *kova one adduced the dialectal Croatian kȏva ‘quarry’, whereas it is a local phonetic variant of the well-attested noun kȃva ‘quarry; pit, trench; mine’, borrowed from the Italian (and Venetian) cava ‘quarry; mine; pit; cave rn’. Among the descendants of the Proto-Slavic *kojiti ‘to soothe, to alleviate’ one included the dialectal Croatian kojȉti ‘to wind a rope, to haul in a net’, whereas it is a fi shing term borrowed from the dialectal Italian coir ‘to wind a rope’; in this context one considered the dialectal Kajkavian Croatian kojiti ‘to breast-feed; to cultivate, to nourish’ (which heretofore was unfamiliar to Croatian scholarship), the actual descendant of the Proto-Slavic *kojiti. The dialectal Croatian lȕća ‘a lump of earth’ was said to be derived from the earlier *glut-ja from the Proto-Slavic *gluta ‘a dense lump of something; protuberance; knag’, whereas the geography indicates that it is more likely a Romance borrowing which is etymologically related to the Latin luteum ‘mud’. In this context one considered the Čakavian lȕća ‘skull’ and ‘a species of a nocturnal moth (death’s head hawkmoth, Acherontia atropos), which is probably related with this Romance borrowing. Apart from the unquestionable Proto-Slavic *klǫpь ‘bench’ one also reconstructed the proto-forms *klupь *klupa, whereas the Slavic words, which were supposed to indicate original forms featuring the root -u- are borrowings from German: Kashubian klëpa ‘a sandbank which protrudes above the sea level’ from the German Klippe ‘coastal rock’, Croatian klupa ‘an instrument which is used to measure the diameter of a tree trunk’ from the German Kluppe, which has the same meaning in the technical language.

The article discusses the matter of portraying Suleiman I the Magnificent in 16th century Croatian and Slovakian literature. The source material comprises three texts: Ferenc Črnko’s Croatian chronicle titled Podsjedanje i osvojenje Sigeta [The Siege and Capture of Siget], the Croatian epic tale Vazetje Sigeta grada [The Caputure of Siget Town] by Brne Karnarutić and the Slovakian anonymous historical song Píseň o Sigetském zámku [A Song about Siget Castle]. By looking at these texts the author hereof contemplates what image of the Turkish ruler has been recorded in Slavic literatures.