Speakers’ attitudes and perceptions in relation to the maintenance of the Fiuman dialect

Abstract

The paper presents the results of a study that aims to investigate Fiuman speakers’ attitudes and perceptions in relation to the maintenance of the Fiuman dialect – the regional minority Romance language spoken in the Croatian city of Rijeka and its surroundings – with a particular focus on age, gender and education level, as individual factors that might determine the processes of language maintenance and shift. A questionnaire enquiring into these issues was distributed to Fiuman speakers of different ages, genders and education levels; the participants’ language biographies and self–assessed proficiency in Fiuman were also examined by the questionnaire. The results show that age and, to a lesser extent, gender and education level predict Fiuman speakers’ self–perceived engagement with, attitudes towards and perceptions of Fiuman maintenance. More precisely, it was shown that Fiuman speakers’ self–perceived engagement with Fiuman maintenance and their positive attitudes towards it rise with age and education level. In addition, Fiuman speakers’ positive perceptions of Fiuman maintenance efforts rise with age and are more characteristic of women than of men. The results provide an insight into the present–day status of the Fiuman dialect, as seen through its speakers’ lenses, and indicate both language maintenance and language shift tendencies.