About the Authors, Motivations, and Perspective in Croatian Dialectal Lexicography

In more than one hundred years of Croatian dialectal lexicography, significant achievements have been made. While dictionaries were published sporadically until the last decade of the twentieth century, mostly as additions to other publications or in specialised journals, and less frequently as standalone works, the number of dictionaries has multiplied since the independence of the Republic of Croatia. A positive development in the dictionary-making process has been the rapid advancement of personal computers and software programs that allow the relatively easy technical production of dictionaries. Among dialectal lexicographers, most are amateurs who are motivated by various internal factors to create dictionaries of Croatian local dialects, smaller and larger areas, or entire dialects. By studying the prefaces and afterwords of more than 130 Croatian dialect dictionaries published between 1957 and the present, one can identify and group the motivations of their authors, and based on the most basic biographical data of the authors, one can also partially predict the development of Croatian dialectal lexicography.