From "Amerikanec" to "？idov". Personal Nicknames of the Kalnik Area of Prigorje

Sa？etak This paper deals with personal nicknames of the Kalnik area of Prigorje in Croatia, a special anthroponomical heritage which has not been researched to date in the mentioned area. Having limited ourselves to 13 places of research, we determined 288 personal nicknames, 245 male and 43 female nicknames, which are still used in informal communication. We analysed these nicknames according to their structure and intrinsic motivation. We found out that the most common structure of nicknames is the simple one, whereas the most common motivation is unknown. However, other nickname motivations according to frequency are: personal names, character, physical characteristics, characteristic words, animals, family names, occupation, ethnonyms or toponyms, family or social roles, titles, objects, food, plants or nicknames of someone else. This linguistic analysis helped us determine to a great extent the extralinguistic reality of the research area