Reflexes of the Habsburg empire multilingualism in some Triestine literary texts

Abstract: In 1964 two contemporary Triestine writers, Lino Carpinteri and Mariano Faraguna, pub-lished a book of poems entitled Serbidiòla. The poems, full of nostalgia, speak about the past when the Habsburg town of Trieste was the most important Adriatic harbour and a significant Central European centre. The book was an absolute success since it was one of the first that showed how profoundly one of the largest and most powerful states in Europe’s modern his-tory had been, and still was, interwoven into collective memory, not only of Trieste’s citizens, but also that of many people living in the territories surrounding the town and even in regions further away from Trieste, such as Dalmatia. Apart from numerous scenes evoking places and events connected to the history of the town during the last three decades of the Habsburg Em-pire and, consequently, its government in Trieste, another element worth mentioning is of lin-guistic nature. Poems written in the Triestine dialect attract the scholar’s attention because of the number of borrowings, either formally integrated or not, that penetrated into the Triestine dialect from languages used in the town and elsewhere in the Empire as well. An analysis of the texts shows that German, Croatian, Hungarian and other loanwords belong to different semantic fields and that they perform important textual functions