"Objective" and "Subjective" Frequency of Internationalisms in Croatian

Abstract

The article deals with the frequency of internationalisms in Croatian from a structural linguistics perspective, taking into account usage-based and psycholinguistic approaches (cf. Backus, 2013 for an overview). Specifically, two different kinds of frequency will be distinguished: The first one is the ‘objective’ frequency, which is taken from a Croatian frequency dictionary (cf. Moguš et al., 1999). The second one refers to the speaker-based, ‘subjective’ assessments of the frequency, which is taken from the Croatian psycholinguistic database (cf. Peti-Stantić et al., 2021). In addition, also the polytextuality (dispersion), i.e. the occurrence of the internationalisms in different functional style, will be discussed as reliable criterion for determination of a core inventory of Croatian internationalisms. Finally, some correlations between the subjective assessment and the polytextuality will be emphasized. The combination of them helps in the determination of the high-frequency inventory of Croatian internationalism, which in turn are a reliable indicator in how far the Croatian core vocabulary is influenced lexically because of language contact respectively puristic attitudes. This inventory of internationalisms is not only of interest from a linguistic point of view but also provides a solid basis for foreign language didactics. It can be assumed that internationalisms can facilitate text comprehension and therefore play a special role in language acquisition. In addition, it can be shown in how much objective and subjective frequency and polytextuality are important selection criteria when creating basic vocabulary.