Curtain or hangings?

Abstract

The paper deals with two words for curtain in contemporary Croatian, zastor and zavjesa. A diachronic analysis of the areal distribution of the two words shows that zavjesa has no single occurrence in Croatian before the 19th. century, whereas it is common in Serbian. Zavjesa is to be regarded as a Serbian loanword in Croatian, which is sociolinguistically more prestigious than the original Croatian zastor.