The Munjaković surname and its etymology
People bearing the Munjaković surname live throughout Croatia today. The surname exists in two variants, with two distinct and unrelated etymologies.
First version
This version originates from the area around Zagreb, specifically the Zagreb Prigorje region. Its roots can be found in the village of Žerjavinec and its surroundings, where bearers of the Munjaković surname have lived since the 16th century.
The first mention of a person connected to the bearers of the Munjaković surname appears in the work “Popisi i obračuni poreza u Hrvatskoj u XV i XVI stoljeću” (Adamček & Kampuš, 1976). It is a document based on a census of households in north-western Croatia from 1598, and it is a good starting point for genealogical research. The work uses the original records written in Latin, but rendered in Hungarian orthography, which in some cases makes reading a little harder. In it we see, for example, the surname Kuzmić written as “Kwzmych”, or the surname Ferenčak as “Fernchah”.
On page 394 of that work there is a record of a colonus (Lat. colonus) named “Juraj Munjak” (Lat. Georgius Munyak), settled in Žerjavinec (Lat. Seryawyncz). This is the first record of the surname in this region.
In the same village, records of the surnames “Munjak” and “Munyak” continue to appear systematically, and in the parish registers of the 18th century the variant “Munjaković” begins to appear among the children of bearers of that surname. In some places it is written as “Munjaković” (in more recent documents), and elsewhere as “Munyakovich” and “Munyakovic”, depending on the document.
From the above one can conclude that the Munjaković variant of the surname from the Zagreb area is most likely a patronymic, and that it originates from the surname “Munjak”, from which it was derived with the possessive suffix -ov, and then the diminutive suffix -ić, as is generally the practice in Slavic languages.
The origin of the surname “Munjak” itself is unclear.
Second version
This version was most likely originally derived from the verb mútiti and comes from a simplification of the surname Mutnjaković, but with the loss of the ⟨t⟩ sound. Bearers of that surname are predominantly from Croatia and neighbouring countries.