Ca je ča

The Labin City Library, at the then Labin Open University, in collaboration with the “Matthias” Bookstore and Antiquarian, began a project in 1993 to nurture and preserve the local dialect by holding the "Ca je ča" literary competition.

Initially, the competition was intended for primary school students and the students of the Mate Blažina High School in Labin. Thanks to the enthusiasm of school teachers and professors of Croatian language and literature who recognized our efforts to preserve the local dialect through student creativity, every year we received a large number of new and unpublished works in which young poets spoke in the “čakavica/cakavica” dialect (Chakavian).

We have published a collection of student works from the literary competition "Ca je ča" in which we collected the winning poems from 1993 to 1995.

In 2004, we included adults in the competition with the intention of allowing poets from the Labin area to take part, but leaving the door open to participants from all over Istria. We combined the winning works from 2004 to 2009 into a collection of songs "Reci mi ca".

In 2013, with the support of Istria County, the City of Labin, the Municipality of Kršan and the Municipality of Raša, we published award-winning children's works in the collection "Ca je ča: a collection of children's dialectal poetry from the 2007-2012 literary competitions."

In 2018, we published a collection of poems in our own edition of "Reci mi ca" in which we collected award-winning dialect poems from the 2010-2017 literary competitions “Ca je ča", in the category "Adults.” The printing of the collection was subsidized by Istria County and the City of Labin.