The Slavicisms borrowed from Croatian, Serbian and Slovenian into the North-Eastern Italian Dialects

Abstract

This paper aims to identify the Slavic loanwords borrowed from Croatian, Serbian, and Slovene into the Italian language, starting with the etymology of words from the three South Slavic languages under consideration (in addition to the etymology recorded in dictionaries under the general term Slavic). Secondly, the paper focuses on the loanwords that correspond with regionalisms (particularly the northeastern ones), defining the transition from regional Italian to standard Italian. The corpus data, obtained mainly from GRADIT (2007) and Zingarelli (2021), is considerable and, from a quantitative point of view, most of the loanwords originated in Serbian and Croatian language: 48 headwords in GRADIT alone, predominantly labelled as technical words. The geographical regions Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Veneto figure prominently in the number of loanwords. Therefore, words relating to history and politics are more commonly of Serbian and Croatian origin (technical words, to be more precise), while words of Slovene origin are mostly found in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region and are predominantly (but not exclusively) gastronyms; the Veneto region, however, testifies to the Venetian-Croatian language contact.