The Prevalence of Italian Lexical Components in the Montenegrin Magazine Zeta

Summary In this contribution we deal with the presence of lexemes originating from the Italian language or its dialects in the articles in the Montenegrin literary magazine Zeta , which was published in Cetinje during the second half of 1885. Besides the Montenegrin authors, other writers using different variants of the Shtokavian dialect also published their works in this journal, in which the translations of nine foreign authors were printed as well. Our first goal is to determine the similarities and differences in the presence of Italianisms conditioned by the author’s origin. Considering the greater exposure of the language in Montenegro to the influence of Italian and its dialects, it can be assumed that the Italian lexical component might be more present in the articles by Montenegrin authors than in the literary works of those who used other variants of Shtokavian. In addition, we want to verify whether the type of literary text affected the presence of Italianisms, starting from the assumption that the lexicon of Italian origin is more widely present in prose works that deal with topics related to everyday life than in poetry or in texts of a professional nature. Finally, we aim to determine to what extent the Italian lexis registered in our corpus is present in the dictionaries of Italianisms in Montenegrin vernaculars, is it adapted in the same way, and whether it appears with the same meaning or tends to present certain meaning variations.