The Language of Stenographic Records of the Dalmatian Parliament in Zadar in the Second Half of the 19th Century

Abstract

The subject of this paper is the language of the stenographic records of the Dalmatian Parliament in Zadar in the second half of the 19th century. The selected corpus represents an authentic record of the language then in use. The goal of this paper is to reconstruct the language on phonological and morphological levels. The second half of the 19th century was marked by processes of codification of the Croatian standard language, which is the reason for the selected time-frame. The chronological frame was determined by the publication dates of two grammars (Budmani's in 1867 and Maretić's in 1899) advocating the vukovian language doctrine. Due to the extended period of time involved here, this paper will only focus on some of the most important problems of language standardization, which include the jat reflex, the selection between etymological and phonological grammars and the question of inflectional suffixes in the genitive, dative, locative and instrumental plural in nouns and pronouns in all three genders. The purpose of this research is to reveal, on the basis of the above listed characteristics, the degree and manner of linguistic change in late 19th century Zadar, as well as the influences on language development.