“The Declaration on the Common Language”: A View from the Inside

The editor of the special issue of AWPEL on former Yugoslavia has kindly invited me to provide the journal’s readership with more information on this document, evaluated in distinctly negative terms by Professor Christian Voß in his contribution to the present collection of articles. I will gladly do so, in my capacity as a native speaker of Serbo-Croatian, a consultant in the drafting process of the Declaration and one of its initial signatories and public supporters. [...]

Revisiting Language, Ethnicity, and Identity in the Former Yugoslavia

This special edition on the language issues in the former Yugoslav space (AWPEL 2.1) provides some new perspectives and approaches to the study of the interplay of language, ethnicity and identity among the peoples of the former Yugoslavia. When I first began focusing on this topic in the early 1990s, the sociolinguistic and ethnographic linguistic literature on the peoples and languages of this multi-ethnic space seemed to be in its infancy. This volume reveals that the case of the former Yugoslavia has proven to be a fruitful field for scholarship in these areas of linguistic inquiry. It is pleasing to see here how younger researchers approach the complex issues arising from the breakup of Yugoslavia and the disintegration of the joint language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian. [...]

Language Issues in former Yugoslav Space: A Commentary

Although the break-up of Yugoslavia has spawned an enormous literature in many fields, Language Issues in former Yugoslav Space: Current Perspectives (Aegean Working Papers in Ethnographic Linguistics Vol. 2, No. 1), 2018 ed. by Roswitha Kersten-Pejanić (general ed. Costas Canakis), is a welcome assessment of some aspects of the current state of affairs from an ethnolinguistic standpoint. The varied articles in this volume each deserve individual attention, and thus my remarks address the articles separately. [...]

Peeling the onion top-down: Language policy in Serbia between power and myth

This paper considers the issue of language policy and planning in Serbia, as managed by the main competent institution, the Serbian Language Standardization Committee, a trans-state, national institution dealing with vital issues of language policy and planning. Specifically, assuming a Bourdieusian perspective, it investigates the ideology behind the Committee’s policies, grounded in a series of language myths, and the way these policies influence professionals and everyday language users. The effects of a rigid, strict educational system and a standard language culture by educators are shown in detail focusing on the Torlak dialect in Southern Serbia. The Serbian case reveals a constant promotion of censorship and a heightened understanding of the benefits of self-censorship in the language market. This can be seen in the pressure exerted on certain speakers and the threat their mother tongue represents for their status in the labor market.

Ethnographic accounts of linguistic issues in the Yugoslav successor states: An introduction

Doing ethnographic linguistics (or linguistic ethnography) in the area of what used to be Yugoslavia is both a challenging and a promising undertaking. Challenging, in that there are so many ideological traps to take into consideration. Promising, in that there are so many complex matters to take a closer look at. These matters, even when exclusively realized in linguistic means, may have great influence on people’s everyday political, cultural, and social meaning-making. Especially so, as indexical relations and the ideological premises and effects of choosing to use one linguistic realization over the other, has played an important role for all speech communities in the region.

Languages of loss and mourning beyond (the) borders: Bosnia

The following paper deals with the language of commemoration of refugee women from ex-Yugoslavia, mainly Bosnia who escaped to Berlin during or after the violent conflicts in the 1990s. Handkerchiefs, personalised with names, birth and death dates of deceased family members, have arisen out of the embroidery therapy they have undertaken. These artefacts all resemble each other in that they recount the trauma of the loss of the beloved dead, whose remains were either found and then reburied, or the dead who remained missing. This micro-study aims at analyzing the verbal and visual means of expression employed by the refugee women in their embroidery. In treating language as a semiotic composition of oral and written verbal communication, image, sound, and movement, it leaves sociolinguistic discussions on the national languages which have emerged in the region behind and delves into the expression of loss and mourning inscribed on the handkerchiefs.

Editorial

Language issues in former Yugoslav space: Current perspectives

Rediscovering the border region in linguistics: Cases from Southeastern Europe

Border region research has recently made its way into various different disciplines and is becoming increasingly useful for sociolinguistics. Nevertheless, in the context of the languages represented in Southeastern European Studies, it is still rather rare today and heretofore non-existent in the Albanian context. This can be explained by the fact that the pivotal research object –state borders– as well as the languages discussed are often used as political and ideological tools. Often, the language situation of a given border region is not taken into account at all, for the sake of preserving the image of linguistic –and thereby national– unity. This paper will show the results of a study in the Albanian-Macedonian border region of Dibra/Debar, which has been divided forroughly 100 years into two parts, situated East and West of the geopolitical border. The central question is to what extent the state border has exerted influence on local dialects, local standard languages, language behavior, and perception of language among the local population.

Linguistic emancipation within the Serbian mental map: The implementation of the Montenegrin and Macedonian standard languages

This paper explores the striking similarity in the hesitant implementation of the new Macedonian and Montenegrin standards, which has taken unusually long in both cases. As will be shown, a comparative look at the two standardisation processes reveals parallels of language politics in Macedonia after 1944 and Montenegro after 2006. In both cases the implementation of the new standard is hesitant, slow, and shows policy shifts. A key conclusion of this paper is that this normative vacuum is possible because Serbian, as the traditional H-variety, is omnipresent in both countries. This observation however implies an optimistic outlook for Montenegrin since Macedonian standardisation today can be assessed as a success story, despite continuous contestation from neighbouring countries. The paper focuses on both differences and commonalities of the standardisation process in these two Yugoslav successor states.