The project The Dictionary of the Dubrovnik Idiom aims to develop a born-digital diachronic dictionary of the Dubrovnik idiom, covering the period from the 16th century to the end of the 21st century. The dictionary is based on a historical corpus compiled within the scope of the project, featuring texts from the same period. Upon completion, the dictionary will be publicly available in digital form as a free online portal, providing valuable insights into the linguistic evolution of the Dubrovnik region. The creation of such a dictionary will meet the needs of both the scholarly and cultural communities, as well as the citizens of Dubrovnik. The Dubrovnik idiom is particularly significant because it played an important role in the standardization of the Croatian language. Furthermore, many well-known Renaissance and Baroque literary works were composed in this idiom, which today is in decline and therefore a matter of concern for its remaining speakers.
The term idiom, used here as a superordinate concept, encompasses both the local Dubrovnik vernacular, in the form of everyday speech and as a stylized literary language found mainly in low-register texts (comedies, congratulatory folk songs, satirical periodicals, etc.), and the literary language used primarily in high-register literature. Since the vernacular, as an authentic living expression, cannot be directly examined for past periods, information about it can only be obtained indirectly from those parts of written texts in which the Dubrovnik vernacular is best reflected (such as dramatic works, congratulatory poems, and transcribed handwritten testimonies) and from genres that effectively convey spoken language, for example, epistolary prose. For more recent periods, the lexicon will be excerpted from audio recordings of speakers of the Dubrovnik vernacular, among the most valuable of whom are emigrants to other continents who best preserve the speech of the second half of the 20th century.
Each lemma will include accentuation and an audio recording, allowing users to listen to its pronunciation with a single click.
The dictionary is expected to be available for free online from 2028.