Abstract:

Beginning from language contacts as the starting point for intercultural education, the article presents Italian-Croatian language contacts among early and preschool children in the Istria County in Croatia. Besides Croatian, people in Istria use Italian, as well as Chakavian which contains a large number of Italianisms, so it is not surprising that children who use the language of their surroundings recognise Italian words in a more natural way. Thanks to that territorial multilingualism, children who live in the Istrian environment, besides being able to hear two (or more) languages, can grow and be brought up bilingually, even though they do not live in a bilingual family. The aim of this paper and research was to find out the extent to which 3 to 7 years old children attending kindergartens in the Croatian language can recognise “by sonority” a word of the Italian standard language through Italianisms used in everyday speech. Data obtained in this research can serve in the analysis of encouraging children to learn a second language from the earliest age, and in the adaptation of various activities and didactic methods in the process of second language acquisition through language contacts.

Keywords:

Second language, language contacts, education, loanwords, word recognition.