Watch Your Language Blog

Croatia on the Map

Croatia has been put on the map.

I just love this English expression because it acknowledges so well what great scholars and writers took tomes to explain (Said and Pamuk are two very great examples)—that our very existence, so plain and obvious to us, is actually a matter of debate and perspective. We don't "exist" until the influential and powerful say that we do. And then, like the Ancient Egyptians, we continue to exist only in profile and not at all en face or all around, because that is the only view they could assume, or cared to assume.

But I'm delighted that, when I say I'm from Croatia, just about everyone now has not only heard of it but is also planning to visit. This all makes a world of difference to my existence: Even less than ten years ago, Croatia was on the map for another, painful reason—a civil war in Yugoslavia, where Croatia was one of the six republics.

The New York Times, which most definitely possesses the cartographic abilities alluded to previously, has published many articles in the last few years about Croatia as the newest hotspot travel destination that I sometimes forward around to my American friends. (My co-workers can vouch for the fact that I'm not too obnoxious about it.) But occasionally, I wonder which map they've been looking, or working, at.

Just in May, two articles were published not just about the Croatian coast in general, but about Istria, my own region, just about an hour (but two border crossings—Slovenia is in between) away from Italy. I'm quite happy with these articles, but couldn't help but doing a little bit of linguistic nitpicking here.

There is mention of the "Slav-accented Italian," as owned by the journalist's Croatian guide through the Istrian peninsula in Nathaniel Vinton's article. "Slav" is of course not one of almost 7000 languages spoken on our wonderfully diversified planet (check for yourself here www.ethnologue.com) and it is definitely not a language spoken in Istria.

There, most people speak hrvatski (Croatian, a Slavic language), almost always in combination with čakavski (a name referring to one of the many local dialects of Croatian), and it seems that the accent referred to by the journalist was influenced by the local Croatian. Many Istrians (those who are ethnically Italian, but also many Croatians), also speak the local dialetto of Italian (an Istrian variety of the Venitian dialect) and if they went to Italian schools, which exist throughout the area, la lingua (standard Italian).

I find this habit to under-differentiate the name of the language spoken by the natives of the lands to be surprisingly common still when reference is made to their majority Croatian residents. And I have never encountered a mention "Romance-accented Croatian," which would be equivalent of the vague "Slav-accented Italian." This habit really only belongs in the writings of Venetian chroniclers of the 17th and 18th centuries and Austrian ethnographers of the 19th century, where, I'm guessing, it must have originated and persisted ever since.

Among the fifteen or so Istrian delicacies described in Mark Bittman's article, only a few carry the actual names (but not the necessary diacritics) used for them locally by most people: fuzi (for fuži, an Istrian pasta, pronounced "foo-zhee"), pasutice (for pašutice, another Istrian pasta, pronouced "pah-shoo-tee-tseh"), bobici (for [maneštra od] bobići, a bean soup with corn, pronounced "mah-neh-shtrah ohd boh-bee-chee"); all the others are, a bit surprisingly, I thought, in straight, standard Italian (frittata, datteri, prosciutto, pecorino, dandoli, mussoli, branzino, grappa "with honey," etc.). So, where on the map are we? Well, definitely not in Italy.

This association with Italy and Italian cuisine has been embraced by Istrians themselves to a certain extent—at least, and hopefully, just for now, when Istria's (and Croatia's) "brand identity" is still being figured out. After all, who heard of Istria even a few years ago? Reference to Italy is a sure-fire mnemonic. Also, the journalist's guide, Lidia Bastianich, is an Italian American born in Istria, which might explain things, too.

The local Croatian dialects are full of very old loanwords from the local Italian dialects (take the words fuži and maneštra as examples), which are now as much a part of the dialects as those words that originally came from French are now a part of more than half of the English language vocabulary. The same goes for food. Maybe a hamburger was originally a German idea, but we'll all agree that it is now very American, and quite different from whatever the original might have been.

Istria is a region of Croatia with a traditionally strong regional identity, espoused by both many ethnic Italians and Croatians, and based on an intertwining of cultures and languages that took place over many centuries and has given rise to a culture that's not just "Croatian" and not just "Italian," but each one and both together.

The political history of the region is more "complicated," as journalists like to say (usually, when it takes too much time and effort to figure it out—I'd say history is quite complicated in most places), but the actual people who live there aren't just victims of overambitious politicians. There hasn't been much political continuity in the area, at least not from an American point of view—for example, my grandmother was born in Austria-Hungary, my mother in Italy, I was born in Yugoslavia and now call my country of origin Croatia, and we were all born within kilometers from each other—but there is a thread and an obvious sense of continuity in families and among neighbors across the area that is unaffected by politics. They gradually form and transform their world by engaging in millions of small and big, insignificant and grand interactions on the market, in the fields, or at the office, often switching between languages and dialects.

Like many border areas around Europe and elsewhere, Istria was passed down between empires and nation-states over centuries, all similarly indifferent to or baffled by the intricacies of the local culture and life, which, like everywhere, remains a "work in progress" defying simplistic classifications. (ZVIEZDANA)


June 12, 2007