In geographical terms, the Istrian peninsula encompasses parts of Croatia and Slovenia, but the ELIC Corpus focuses on varieties spoken in Istria County in Croatia and in neighboring parts of Primorsko-Goranska County, referred to as the Kvarner region. The latter is named for the Kvarner Gulf, a deep bay in the northern Adriatic sea between the Istrian peninsula and the northern Croatian coast. (map source: Wikimedia Commons) Istria-Kvarner is a linguistically diverse border region, which has undergone successive waves of immigration and emigration through its long and complex history. Slavic-speaking peoples began migrating into the Balkans in the second half of the 6th century and soon afterwards began settling in the Kvarner and Istria regions, which at that time were part of the Byzantine Empire, with a mainly Roman population. From the 14th century up into modern times, Istria-Kvarner was on the frequently shifting border between competing powers: the Republic of Venice and the Habsburg Empire, and later Italy and Yugoslavia. The sociolinguistic situation in the Istria-Kvarner region, with multiple minority varieties and two prestige varieties that have varying degrees of genetic relationship and linguistic similarities, offers special opportunities to test hypotheses about language contact. The data collected in this project and the creation of a searchable spoken corpus will not only document the current state of varieties spoken in the region and serve as a resource for local community members interested in the preservation and revitalization of their local varieties, but will also provide us with valuable quantitative data for linguistic research.
