Ćići

Ćić (plural Ćići, Slovene: Čiči, German: Tschitschen, Italian: Cicci, Chicchi, Ciccio), is an ethnonym and exonym in a broader sense for all the people who live in the mountainous Ćićarija area in Croatia and Slovenia. Alongside the term Ćiribici, in the narrow sense, it is an exonym referring to a community of the Istro-Romanians in the village Žejane in a small part of eastern Ćićarija and the villages around the former Lake Čepić west of the Učka range in Istria, Croatia.

The first, unspecified thesis of possible Romance origin was given by Franc Miklošič in 1860 when he designated all Čiči as "overall Slavicized Romanians".Linguist and phonologist Josip Ribarić (1880–1954), a native of Vodice in Ćićarija, disproved this thesis with historical documents, anthroponyms and language dialects in the karst. According to him, the term Ćići initially referred to the Romance-speaking Balkan population, the same as Morlachs (i.e. Vlachs) and became an exonym for all newcomers to the karst plateau.

Ribarić noted the thesis by Arthur Byhan (1899), which asserted that Chichi (ch/ci=ć) comes from the Italian word cicaleccio (from verb cicalare), which means "insistent and confused (indistinct) talking". They were so named by the Slavs because they couldn't understand them.

...
Wikipedia