Building a Historical Corpus of Croatian Correspondence

Hoyt, Alexander D. Building a Historical Corpus of Croatian Correspondence. [Manuscript or preprint] (In Press)

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Abstract

Building a historical corpus of Croatian correspondence My project is an attempt to learn about linguistic change and variation in a linguistic community (Croatian speakers at the turn of the twentieth century) whose written language was undergoing the process of standardization. I am compiling a corpus of personal correspondence, consisting of four types of written messages (traditional letters, postcards, calling cards, and telegrams) written at 10-year intervals between 1875 and 1925, from the personal collection of Istrian politician Vjekoslav Spinčić (1848-1933), kept in the Croatian State Archives. The collection contains some letters written by Spinčić himself, although the vast majority consists of letters sent to him by other people from all levels of society. Most historical corpus projects of this type have focused on English and other Northern European languages with longer traditions of literacy. This is the first such study on Croatian, as well as one of the first historical studies of the Croatian language based upon natural language use rather than, say, the language of literature. Not only will this research be a contribution to the study of language change and variation, but the content of the letters themselves will be of interest to researchers in other fields of study, such as history or ethnology.

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