Prilagodba stranih i pomodnih imena hrvatskome jezičnome sustavu
Adaptation of foreign and fashionable names to the Croatian linguistic system

Summary/Abstract: The most popular personal names in Croatia are of either Christian, or of common national or Slavic origin, but because of globalization, ideology, media influence, desire for originality and uniqueness, the number of anthroponymic loanwords is increasing in the onomastic database of the Croatian linguistics.Foreign and fashionable personal names have been recorded using the note-making method and on a sample of 320 primary school students. The main goal was to identify which and what kind of foreign and fashionable names are given to Croatian pupils most frequently, what lexical and grammatical characteristics these names possess, according to which declension and orthographic rules they are used in written language and how they are adapted to the Croatian linguistic system. The data were analyzed using three variables: the participant’s age, place of residence and parents’ education. According to the initial hypotheses, we expected that the number of foreign and fashionable names would keep increasing, that they would be more common in urban than in rural areas and that most of the students would not be able to keep the morphological changes of these names within the standard language norms. Since given names are usually nouns or nominalized adjectives, a category-based analysis of the corpus was conducted while data processing and the Kruskal-Wallis test was used, which enabled us to identify the statistically significant difference between the variables. The research has shown that more than a half of the participants carry a foreign or a fashionable name, although the research has also confirmed that the anthroponymic loanwords, due to their maladjustment to the Croatian linguistic system, present a grammatical and orthographic problem to students. In oral and written communication, such names tend to cause difficulties so they do not become part of the active vocabulary of primary school students. On the other hand, such names are official and legal, so the standard Croatian language cannot mark them as incorrect, despite their irregularity.The results of this research could serve as an incentive to adapt foreign and fashionable names to the Croatian linguistic system, so that students could use them correctly in everyday communication without the fear of making a mistake.

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