Linguistische Treffen in Wrocław (Jan 2024)
Deutsch-kroatischer Sprachkontakt: Zur Entwicklung der kroatischen agrarwissenschaftlichen Fachterminologie am Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts / German-Croatian Language Contact: On the Adaptation and Integration of German Loanwords from the Field of Agricultural Sciences at the Beginning of the 20th Century
Abstract
The town of Križevci in north-western Croatia is located in a region where agriculture is one of the main economic activities. Historically, it is the former Military Frontier established by the Habsburgs in the 16th century to ward off the westward encroaching Ottomans. The presence of the Austrian army in the Military Frontier led to lively German-Croatian language contact, since German was not only the language of command, but was also used as the official language of administration. The dominance of German in the public life of the Military Frontier favored the adoption of many German loanwords into Croatian and played a significant role in the development of Croatian agricultural terminology at the beginning of the 20th century. Professional texts from the agricultural scientific journal “Gospodarska smotra”, which was published between 1909 and 1919, form the template for the research corpus for the following paper. In particular, it was researched how the German agricultural terms are embedded in the Croatian text and which adaptation processes had an effect on the borrowing and integration into Croatian. It was established that when German technical terms were adopted into Croatian, various forms of loan creations were used, with German technical term compounds being replaced by various forms of attributive compounds. Furthermore, many text passages from the research corpus contain reflections and arguments by their authors on the concept of technical language in general and thus offer a valuable source for sociolinguistic and technical language follow-up research.
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