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In:World Englishes in their Local Multilingual Ecologies
Edited by Peter Siemund, Gardy Stein and Manuela Vida-Mannl
[Hamburg Studies on Linguistic Diversity 9] 2025
► pp. 364–383

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Chapter 16
English as a lingua franca in Croatia’s multilingual ecology

 | TU Dortmund University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 24 April 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/hsld.9.16vid
Abstract
This chapter offers one of the first assessments of the role of English in Croatia that focuses on non-educational settings. After presenting the linguistic history of Croatia as part of former Yugoslavia, it offers an overview of Croatia’s current linguistic ecology. In so doing, the status and role of the most important and most frequently used languages in Croatia are introduced before zooming in on the role and use of English. While English has been part of the linguistic ecology of Croatia in various domains for quite some time already, it has so far predominantly been investigated in educational contexts. This chapter will focus on tourism and discuss how English might be conceptualized in these contexts. Using the framework of English as a lingua franca (ELF) to assess linguistic features occurring in oral interview data, the paper shows that tourism in Croatia can be considered to be a context of ELF use. However, the analysis also shows that some characteristics of ELF that are found in the data might also be explained by specific language contact between Croatian and English and that yet other linguistic characteristics might not be accounted for so easily and should hence be further investigated.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The multilingual ecology of Croatia
    • 2.1Language use and status in Croatia
    • 2.2English for touristic purposes in Croatia
  • 3.ELF in tourism contexts: Methodology and data
    • 3.1Morphological features of ELF
    • 3.2Syntactic features of ELF
  • 4.English for touristic purposes in Croatia: Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (61)
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