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The development of Croatian dialectal lexicography has been written about several times. For example, Lisac (2005; 2018) listed previous publications that could be called dialectological dictionaries or word lists; to the work from 2018, he attached valuable maps (created by Tome Marelić) with marked places and areas that have their own dialect dictionary. A list of selected Croatian dialect dictionaries is provided by Menac-Mihalić & Celinić (2012, pp. 300–302) and Samardžija (2018, pp. 163–167), and similar can be found elsewhere (for example, see under “Additional literature” for the course Croatian Dialect Lexicography at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb: https://theta. ffzg.hr/ECTS/Predmet/Index/1719). A complete bibliography of Croatian dialect dictionaries has not yet been created, and the question is what should be eventually included in it. Namely, it is sometimes difficult to determine what we could consider a dialect dictionary, and what is just a list of words – works of an explanatory nature such as the ones mentioned and lists of selected dialect dictionaries are certainly a good guide for determining the boundary. For a true judgment, however, it is necessary to review and qualitatively assess all the listed works that could be considered dialectal dictionaries. Although several authors have written about the principles of creating dialect dictionaries and the design of their entries (Kapović, 2008; Tamaro, 2008; Blažeka, 2006; 2008; 2019), and the principles of creation are often included in the dialect dictionaries themselves (see, for example, Oštarić & Vranić, 2016, pp. 105–110; Kovačec, 2020, pp. 13–16), even when the author is an amateur (see Kranjčević, 2003, pp. XVII–XX), there are actually rare cases in which authors of dialect dictionaries follow good theoretical and practical examples. Namely, not all authors have the same ambitions when creating dialect dictionaries and often the ambitions of amateur authors do not coincide with the needs of the dialectology profession. While some authors, mostly professionals, try to be consistent in the choice of words to include in the dictionary and in the formatting of dictionary articles according to certain criteria, amateurs are often content with compiling alphabetical lists of words that deviate in one way or another from the standard language, with minimal linguistic processing of the material. This paper will try to look at the motives behind the creation of dialect dictionaries and assume, as far as possible, in which direction Croatian dialect lexicography will develop. We will see how productive Croatian dialect lexicography really is, who the authors of dialect dictionaries are and whether it is possible to predict the tendencies of dialect dictionary production based on quantitative data about them and their motives. For this purpose, a database of 130 dialectal dictionaries of Croatian local dialects or groups of Croatian local dialects within the borders of the Republic of Croatia was created, with basic bibliographic data about these dictionaries (author’s name and surname, year of publication, scope of the work, etc.) and metadata that are mostly drawn from their preface and afterword (e.g., author’s age, author’s profession, motives for creating the dictionary, etc.). Dictionaries that were published within the journal were excluded, although among them there are important contributions to Croatian dialect lexicography.
