Romance loanwords in sewing terminology in Chakavian local dialect of Bratulići

Abstract

In this contribution, sewing terms in contemporary Chakavian local dialect of Bratulići in Istria are studied, with particular attention to terms of Romance origin. An initial overview of the basic characteristics of this Chakavian idiom is followed by a literature review, research aims and methods. Besides terms referring to the sewing process itself, the corpus presented in the central part of this contribution comprises terms denoting measuring, tailoring, cutting, altering, and adjusting. They were collected during the the authors’ fieldwork, through semi-structured interviews and recordings of the interviewer’s spontaneous speech. For each Romance loanword, the etymological description has been provided, together with the analysis of its phonological and morphological adaptations. Moreover, each sewing term is compared with equivalents in selected Chakavian local dialects with the aim to shed light on diatopic variation.

Keywords

• Southwestern Istrian dialect group
• Chakavian dialect
• Bratulići
• sewing terms
• etymology
• loanwords