The People

Beśida exists only because a handful of people spent decades recording the Komiža dialect. This is their page — and the list of works on which all language content in this app rests.

Joško Božanić

Born in Komiža, professor emeritus of the University of Split. For half a century he has been recording and publishing Komiža's facende (oral tales), the fishermen's language (lingua halieutica) and the Komiški dikcionar — a dictionary appearing letter by letter since 2006. He led the heritage protection of the dialect and founded the Ars Halieutica association.

Pavao Mardešić-Centin

A Komiža shipwright (1895–1978) who compiled the first dictionary of the dialect, published in 1977 — with proverbs, carols and stories.

Andro Roki-Fortunato

An islander who compiled the Libar viškiga jazika in emigration (Toronto, 1997) — at ~20,000 entries the most thorough dictionary of any Čakavian community.

The scholars

Božidar Finka, Marijana Tomelić Ćurlin, Katarina Lozić Knezović, Filip Galović, Lucija Šimičić, Anita Runjić-Stoilova and others described the dialect's sounds, accents and grammar.

Tonko Božanić Pepe

Komiža boat-builder and folk poet whose voice was recorded for the Croatian Sound Atlas — the living sound of komiški.

Where do the app's sentences come from?

Sentences marked with the anchor ⚓ are attested verbatim in the published records listed below, rendered in Božanić's modern orthography (ś, ź, c). Unmarked sentences are composed strictly from attested words and described rules and await native-speaker verification — if you are a speaker, every error report directly improves the app.

Sources