The main objective of the analysis is to provide a linguistic description of Split, being the centre of Dalmatia after the Italian occupation of the city of Zadar, in the period between the two World Wars, based on the analysis of the corpus of the Split daily newspapers. It shall indicate the attitude of the daily editorials towards the Croatian language and depict examples of language policy as it was carried out in daily newspapers. Two opposing tendencies shall be distinguished: newspapers that emphasize language Unitarianism, largely in line with the dominant norms of Aleksandar Belić and Vuk Karadžić, contrasted to the emancipatory paradigm of daily papers with their distinctive “Croatian” determinant, more or less successfully translated into national language identity. The researched corpus is analyzed by a method of qualitative content analysis in order to determine and explain the similarities and differences of the written material. Linguistic analysis includes orthographic, phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical levels, and special attention is given to articles on language and orthography that had been published in the analyzed interwar period daily papers. The first part provides a short overview of Dalmatia’s political history in the period between the two World Wars, as well as the development of journalism in Split in this period, introducing the analysed daily papers, and giving information on the censorship forced by the authorities. The second part presents a detailed linguistic analysis of the corpus, which includes orthographic, phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical levels. On each of these levels, significantly different approaches to language features by the two opposing groups of daily papers have been stressed. The more prominent and more successful Croatian language identification in line with political national identification has been shown by the group of daily papers following the emancipatory paradigm only in the late thirties of the 20th century. The third part pays special attention to articles on language and orthography that had been published in analysed journals. The omitted or underrepresented linguistic events have also been depicted, showing that the Unitarian group of daily papers often chose to ignore or underrepresent significant language information. For example, the request by Pavle Radić and other members of the Croatian Peasant Party to write parliament records in Croatian and Latin script has been ignored by “Novo doba”. The linguistic and orthographic analysis confirmed the initial hypotheses: the comparative reading of Split daily papers with the Unitarian paradigm and those that promote the Croatian national idea confirmed that the two groups carried out significantly different language polices in many ways. The Unitarian-oriented group of analyzed Split daily papers emphasizes language Unitarianism as well, and the emancipatory daily papers did not have a strong impact on public language, being short-lived due mainly to political reasons. However, the deep-rooted idea of the consistently Unitarian Split between the two World Wars has been re-evaluated, presenting a different, although less prominent, nationally conscious paradigm promoted by a minor group of daily papers with their distinctive “Croatian” determinant nurturing Croatian linguistic distinctiveness in their newspaper editions.
