IN SEARCH OF THE COMPETENT SPEAKER

Sa？etak Any investigation into the accentual reality of the Croatian language is based on listening to communicative practice and in this case the investigation is limited to specific groups within the language community. Who are the competent speakers of the Croatian language? The literature mentions the model speaker, the ideal speaker, and the professional speaker. Precise differences in terminology requires clarifications and clear indications of whom we investigate within the research of Croatian orthoepic standards. We offer a wider model, based on the approaches initially developed within glottodidactics, and which follows the path from linguistic competence towards communicative competence. Situationally competent speakers adapt their expressions to the situation and the listener, and in these cases normative correctness is not critical (sometimes it even creates noise in the communication channel). In other words, a competent speaker is not one who invariably follows the normative rules, who is a representation of exemplary speech, but rather one who takes into account the layers of linguistic reality