December 11, 2020 – How hard is the Croatian language really? Perhaps it depends a little on your teacher – here is how to speak Dalmatian using only vowels.
Anyone who has spent an extended amount of time in Dalmatia, particularly out of season, will be familiar with the Dalmatian Grunt. It is a gruff form of greeting, which can sound quite threatening, but is actually a very friendly and informal way of locals greeting each other.
In all my years in Dalmatia, never did I find a finer exponent of the Dalmatian Grunt than Frank John Dubokovich in Jelsa on Hvar. In fact, listening to Frankie speak Dalmatian was an exercise in anthropology – what the hell was he saying, and did anyone have a clue what he was saying (I certainly didn’t).
The grunt gave me an idea several years ago – to start a YouTube guide in how to speak Dalmatian, Hvar-style. It was a small project without any planning, but as longterm readers of TCN (and Total Hvar before that) may recall, the series got off to a flying start with Lesson One, above, the Dalmatian Grunt, amassing over 50,000 views on YouTube before my channel was removed for some reason. Frankie became known as Professor Frank John Dubokovich, Guardian of the Hvar Dialects, and his unique teaching methods had him appear on both national and international television after a British TV reality show commissioned him to teach its contestants in Croatia.
With the loss of the YouTube channel, I feared that the videos were lost forever, but I have managed to salvage many of them and so am in the process of republishing them once more, several years later.
Grunting of course is just a small part of the sophisticated Dalmatian language arsenal. What is even more impressive is how locals can use vowels to such incredible effect to convey meaning. So much so, in fact, that one wonders at times if one needs consonants to speak Dalmatian at all.
In our latest episode, The Professor hopped on the catamaran to visit me in Split, where he gave a masterclass in how to speak Dalmatian using only vowels, over a coffee (or perhaps something stronger) at Brasserie on 7 on the Split waterfront.
Nothing I have heard in any language comes close to the linguistic genius contained in the Dalmatian phrase, A e!
Not convinced by The Professor’s methods? Here are 25 common mistakes foreigners make when speaking Croatian, as compiled from Cro2Go’s Mihaela Sego.
