Previous studies on the linguistic and cultural relationships between Croatian and Italian have mainly focused on historical-language contacts, particularly within Romance studies, dialectology, and lexical borrowing, with an emphasis on the influence of Italian on Croatian Adriatic dialects. The project activity of Snježana Bralić, Associate Professor, is focused on culturally marked linguistic units—such as idioms, distinctive expressions, and metaphors—and their pragmatic and semantic potential in intercultural communication remains relatively limited. There is a notable lack of studies that apply intercultural competence as an analytical tool, integrating linguistic analysis with cultural interpretation in contemporary communicative and educational contexts. Although the Mediterranean is recognized as a space of diverse cultural influences and historical interactions, linguistic studies of Croatian–Italian relations through modern intercultural communication theories are still underdeveloped. It is precisely in this area that this project activity positions its research niche, aiming to fill this scientific gap and introduce new methodological approaches to the study of language and culture. Its innovative character lies in its interdisciplinary orientation, linking linguistics, cultural studies, and intercultural communication within the Mediterranean context. The study adopts the intercultural competence model, moving beyond traditional contrastive linguistics and enabling a dynamic interpretation of language as a vehicle of cultural exchange. The research methodology is based on two cultural classification theories (Newmark, 1988; Díaz Cintas & Remael, 2007) to analyse specific linguistic lexis. A descriptive method will be applied to collect and categorize linguistic elements from Croatian and Italian. The comparative method will enable contrastive analysis of semantic, pragmatic, and cultural differences between the two languages. The use of Michael Byram’s interculturalapproach (2002) will facilitate the analysis of communicative competence and intercultural relations. The study will be enriched with case studies, corpus sources, dictionaries, and audio/videomaterials, while surveys among students and native speakers will provide insight into the perception and usage of the analysed linguistic units.
