This display focuses on a 2014 textbook for Burgenland Croatian, 'Zdravo!', created for bilingual schools in Austria's Burgenland region. It addresses the crucial task of preserving minority languages, highlighting how this textbook helps students learn a variant of Croatian unique to Austria, incorporating influences from German and Hungarian.
The item presented is a significant educational artifact: the 2014 textbook "Zdravo! Lehrbuch der burgenlandkroatischen Sprache für die zweisprachige Schule des Burgenlandes". Authored by Emmerich Berlaković, Stefan Karazman, Matthäus Palatin, and Anton Mesner, with graphics by Stefan Karazman and Walter Weber (Austrian National Library), this textbook is central to the critical task of preserving minority languages within the education system. The Burgenland Croatian language, spoken by approximately 20,000 people in 2001, faces a decline in speakers, making resources like this textbook vital for its continued transmission.
This textbook is specifically designed for bilingual primary school education in Austria's Burgenland, enabling students to learn Croatian even if it's not their first language. It plays a key role in passing on a language variant found exclusively in Austria, which features vocabulary distinct from standard Croatian and includes loanwords from German and Hungarian. The text also touches upon the legal rights of minority groups to education in their own languages in Austria, noting the historical development of bilingual schooling in the Burgenland since the Second Republic and the establishment of secondary education options for Burgenland Croatian speakers in 1992.