Family Multilingualism in the Minority Community of Croatia (The Сase of a Multilingual Family from Western Slavonia)

The paper discusses the linguistic competence of members of a mixed Czech-Croatian-Bolivian family living in western Slavonia. Language competence in Croatian, Czech and Spanish is analyzed. Czech is used within the Czech minority, Spanish is used by a native of Bolivia with Croatian roots. The models of loanwords adaptation of Croatian items in the Spanish and Czech speech of interlocutors, as well as the adaptation of Czech items in Croatian language are analyzed. Particular attention is paid to the linguistic characteristics of the native idioms of the informants: the Bolivian version of Spanish and the Croatian version of Czech. Statistical methods are used to identify the frequency of functioning of individual borrowed items. It is stated that the degree of penetration of L2 items into L1 depends not only on the genetic affinity of the languages, but also on the time of their acquisition and on the frequency of use. The case under consideration is unique for this region and allows us to find out the mechanisms of using three languages at the micro level.