Stivor Variety

The Štivor variety is a heritage Romance language originating from the Valsugana Valley in the Italian province of Trentino. In the 1880s, approximately 100 families from the Valsugana Valley, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, relocated to present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina following devastating floods.

Štivor is considered a variety of Venetan. It exhibits typical Venetan (and more broadly Western Romance) phonological features, which include:

– The loss of the Romance final *-e* (e.g., Št. *parlar* /par’lar/ ‘to speak’).

– Degemination of Romance geminated consonants (e.g., Št. *fero* /’fɛro/).

– Lenition of intervocalic Romance plosives, particularly the dropping of voiced velar or dental consonants (e.g., Št. *fradelo* /fra’dɛlo/, Št. *koa* /’koa/).

Additionally, Štivor displays palatalization, a feature absent in present-day Trentine-Venetan varieties (e.g., Št. Valšugana /valʃu’gana/ compared to Roncegno Valsugana /valsu’gana/; Št. žnjapa /’ʒɲapa/ vs. Roncegno sgnapa /’zɲapa/ ‘brandy’). At the syntactic level, Štivor employs subject clitics.

Contact-induced features from Slavic include phonetic changes, such as the shift from kw to kv (e.g., Valsug. quel /’kwel/ > Št. kvel /’kvel/ ‘that’; Valsug. quanto /’kwanto/ > Št. kvanto /’kvanto/ ‘how much’). Additionally, Štivor has incorporated loanwords from Serbo-Croatian, such as pluk (from Sr. plug ‘plough’) and šet (from Sr. zet ‘son-in-law’).

The endonyms for the variety include Štivoroto, štivorski dijalekt, dialetto, and dialeto de šti ani, while the ethnonym for its speakers is Štivorians. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, speakers of Štivoroto are classified as speakers of Italian.

The Štivor variety is critically endangered, with only a handful of speakers (no more than 10) remaining in the village of Štivor. However, the broader Štivorian community is larger, as many members reside abroad, primarily in Italy. The language lacks a literacy tradition, and there are very few spoken records of it.