The article attempts to consider issues related to the presence of various language varieties in Croatian literature – general/standard (native and foreign), regional (dialects, regiolects), social (sociolects). Focusing primarily on artistic narrative prose, the author tries to show how the heritage of centuries‑old multilingualism in the culture of Croatia translated into various stylistic phenomena, how it evolves and what consequences it may have not only for the language itself, but also for cultural phenomena. Thanks to this approach, an attempt is made to highlight the circumstances related to the choice of the Shtokavian dialect as the literary language in the 19th century.

The purpose of this article is to show the function and frequency of Turkish loanwords in modern Croatian language based on a questionnaire survey. Respondents were diversified in age, gender nad origin. The subject of analysis were stylistically marked loanwords that have fallen victim to a puristic language policy pursued by the Croatian linguists in popular language guides, especially in the 1990s. As survey results show, these activities aimed at removing Turkish loanwords from Croatian languague proved to be ineffective. Most of these words are still being used by the Croats simultaneously with the native synonyms. Puristic view declared by some of the respondents does not affect the usage of the Turkish loanwords in unofficial situations.

The article deals with 8 etymologies of dialectal lexemes (along with their variant forms and derivatives) in three dialects of Croatian: drlo and drlog ‘mess, old things scattered’, krtog ‘lair; mess’, madvina (medvina) ‘lair, den’, mlađ / mlaj ‘silt’, sporak / sporǝk ‘hill, slope’, tušek ‘empty grain; undeveloped corn cob’, zavet i zavetje ‘sheltered place’, žužnja ‘leather shoelace; string; ribbon; belt’.