German and French Impact on Croatian Musical Terminology

Sa？etak The universal character of music as an art is reflected in its sign system, which is used in order to notate and transmit music. However, apart from musical notation and a specific set of signs, music necessarily has to rely on a standard language in order to establish effective internal and external communication. Croatian musical terminology comprises numerous international and foreign terms that have been preserved to this day. This paper will focus on contemporary Croatian musical terms created through direct or indirect loaning of German and French terms. The work is based on the corpus of words extracted from the Croatian vocabulary and the encyclopaedical manuals published since the 19th century to the present day. The analysis was carried out in contact linguistics, which includes the sociolinguistic and linguistic analysis, while the theoretical framework includes terminological theory