Sophia Smith Galer looks at an article, and a doctoral thesis, about the Venetian-origin dialect once prevalent in the city of Fiume/Rijeka, now ever more endangered
Cities where many languages are or have been spoken tend to also bear many different names.
Fiume, as it is known in Italy, is no exception. English speakers might not have heard of Fiume, which they’d be forgiven for assuming is in Italy – the Italian name remains barely changed from flumen, the Latin word it inherited, meaning river. But the city of Fiume isn’t in Italy – it’s in Croatia, where Croatian speakers call it Rijeka, after the Croat word for river.
This seaport of just over 100,000 people has had its ownership contested for centuries. In the last century it was swapped between the (now defunct) Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy, Yugoslavia and then, on the declaration of its independence in 1991, the present-day republic of Croatia. Just 76 km away from Trieste (which is in Italy), the city hosts not only standard Croatian and a local Croatian dialect known as Chakavian, but the vestiges of il dialetto fiumano, a dialect of the Venetian language continuum that spans the north-east of Italy.
In the grand age of Venetian trade, ships sailing across the Adriatic facilitated constant language contact alongside the movement of people. Words travelled, were adopted, exchanged. As the dominion of other European powers over the city solidified, the dialetto increasingly accrued German and Hungarian words. Fiuman itself stayed prominent in the city well into the 20th century. In 1909, the pedagogist Gemma Harasim wrote that “it is almost a general rule that when Hungarians, Croats and Italians meet, the language of exchange remains Italian.”*
But Fiuman is now severely endangered. In this piece from La Voce newspaper, we learn about Kristina Blagoni’s doctoral thesis on Fiuman. Based on seven years of fieldwork and over 240 interviews, Blagoni makes the case that Fiuman isn’t simply a language spoken at home, or by people of the past – as is so commonly said of Italy’s under-appreciated language diversity. Rather it should be considered a “minority urban dialect”, still emerging in domains like public life, school and in the community more broadly. Speaking at a cultural week in Fiume – as this Italian newspaper calls it – a local Italian Studies professor said that Blagoni’s thesis is “a fundamental contribution to understanding the ecolinguistic and identity dynamics of our city.”
Blagoni lists five different kinds of relationship that exist today between speakers and their dialect: speaking it at home with parents, amongst friends, in general daily life, to children and, lastly and perhaps most existential, in the formation of identity. As in other cities where language shift is taking place, Blagoni has identified a drop in parents passing the language on to young children, with just 121 monolingual Fiuman-speaking families in her study as the city continues its shift to Croatian. Some proud Fiuman-speaking grandparents find that their grandchildren understand what they’re saying, but reply in Croatian. “As many as 80 percent of those interviewed,” Blagoni says, “believe that Fiuman is disappearing.”
Blagoni’s work is more about understanding the linguistic reality of Fiume than providing solutions to maintaining the language. That said, she suggests that a framework across public life reminding speakers of Fiuman’s value and its relevance to daily life would be helpful, as would improved census data on multilingualism.
(That last recommendation is something I hear begged for by linguists all around the globe: we almost never have enough data to draw a robust picture of the true state of most cities’ linguistic diversity. Perhaps – and now this is me talking, as a cartographer of linguicide and journalist who studies language loss – reviving and reclaiming Fiuman in this many-named city is as much about reminding residents of their proud, translanguaging past as much as it is about the specific jewel of Fiuman.)
“What has always distinguished the people of Rijeka,” Blagoni says, “is the ability to move between multiple linguistic universes.”
* Gemma Harasim, „Riječka pisma“, Fluminensia, year V (1993), number 1-2, pp.8-9
Original article (“Dove il dialetto fiumano continua a sussurrare”) by Ornella Sciucca was first published in Italian on 13 June 2025.
It’s available here.
La Voce del Popolo is an Italian-language daily newspaper published by EDIT in the Croatian city of Rijeka.
Summary by SSG
