Dialect Change in the Croatian-Čakavian Variety of Betina. The Case of Olive Growing Terminology

Abstract

The paper aims to determine change in quantitative variability at the lexical level in the Croatian-Čakavian Variety of Betina on the island of Murter using the example of forty– eight selected terms from the field of olive growing terminology. Starting from the assumption that younger speakers use fewer dialectal variants than their older peers, we consider three reasons of the dialect change: language accommodation, social and economic changes, and gender as a factor of change. The field study consisted of structured interviews with respondents from two generations of speakers. The lexical corpus was collected from six older respondents, and then the knowledge of the meaning and use of the term was verified among nine younger respondents. The results show that 63 % of speakers knew the meaning and that 43 % used the terms from the field of olive growing, which indicates a decrease in the quantitative variability and dialect change at the lexical level in Betina's variety.