The project on the history of Croatian under fascism examines the research question to what extent linguistic specifica of Croatian in the time of the fascist Ustaša-Regime (1941-1945) in texts of fictional prose can be identified, i.e. linguistic caracteristics which differ from previous eras. Furthermore, the project analyses what specifica can be proven and how they can be explained as a result of fascist linguistic politicy. The study is centered around the Novel „Giga Barićeva“ (GB) by Milan Begović (1876-1948) and, in particuliar, the history of linguistic censorship during croatian fascism. The governing of the Ustaša-Regime in the so called „Nezavisna Država Hrvatska“ (NDH), in the 'Independant State Croatia', was marked by heavily controlled language policy (cf. parallels to be considered, among others, in Germany and Italy at the time).
In this project, a digital corpus is being established, consisting of different texts that have been published until the end of NDH (1945). The corpus contains so far the five different editions of the novel GB (first edition: 1930/1931). This means, three editions were published in the time before the NDH, and two during that time.
In order to enable a comparison with other Croatian texts, that have been published during the time of the NDH, more texts are added to the digital corpus: a) four Croatian novels by different authors, each one in the edition from before and after the foundation of the NDH, b) four additional novels by Begović that are very similar to GB on the textual level, each one in editions before and after the foundationen of the NDH. Such a digital parallel corpus allows us to compare different editions of the same text and to find differences between the editions before and after the NDH; i.e.differences, that are often due to censorship in the sense of fascist language policies or at least in the sense of an adaption that has its traces in politics.
The process of the digital evaluations of "Giga Barićeva" can be summarised and presented in the following three steps: preprocessing (digitalization), collation and postprocessing.
The project works on a widly undocumented field and contributes to the establishing of a branch of research. It describes for the first time the complex textual history of GB until 1945, i.e. especially the extensive changes in the text during the NDH, which affect not only vocabulary and orthography, but also pronounciation, inflexion and syntax. The comparison with the different editions of other works, as well as the usage of texts about efforts to preserve the language from NDH times are helpful to determine, which linguistic particularities can be found in the newer editions of GB and how they can be explained in a linguistic-ideological and historical context. On the basis of this digital corpus, texts can be compared using methods of digital humanities. Connecting analytical methods of philology (amongst others edition philology), history, corporal linguistics and digital humanities (amongst other digital textlation with CollateX, text analysis with Python and R) helps to describe even more accurately, how language manipulation was implemented during fascism. The NDH and its language are still a taboo in Croatia and the number of studies about the language of the NDH time is extremely limited. Therefore, it is another goal of this research, to break the silence among scientists and to sensitize society - also the Croatian one - for this highly charged topic (non-scientific importance).
