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Language & Identity in the Balkans: Croatian Evolution

Explore Croat linguistic development from unity to separate identity, orthographic controversies, and nationalist influence.

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Language & Identity in the Balkans: Croatian Evolution

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  1. Language & Identity in the Balkans Ch 5 Croatian: We are separate but equal twins

  2. 5.0 Introduction • 19th c Gaj & Illyrians advocate Neo-Stokavian ijekavian Croatian standard, despite real dialectal differences on the ground • Today Croats downplay the role the Illyrians had in unifying their language with the Serbs • Croat linguists are preoccupied with proving that Croatian and Serbian are separate languages

  3. 5.1 Croatian from Broz to Brozovic • Language issues are prominent when Croats feel threatened by stronger/larger neighbors • Hungarian nationalism spurred them to join forces with the Serbs, but in a short while Serbs were transformed from allies to enemies • Two big events: • 1901 Broz & Ivekovic dictionary • 1971 Brozovic “Ten Theses on the Croatian Standard Language”

  4. 5.1.1 Contributions of the “Croat Vukovites”: Traitors or patriots? • Croat linguists today interpret 19th c events as contributing to the development of a Croatian standard language, not a joint Serbo-Croatian one • They interpret unity in Yugoslavia as something that was forced on the Croats

  5. 5.1.2 Tito’s Yugoslavia: Croatian and not Croato-Serbian • Croats feel they were betrayed by the Communists, whose policy favored maintaining a single Serbo-Croatian • Struggle for lingusitic freedom • 1967 Zagreb Linguistics Circle Declaration on the Name and Position of the Croatian Literary Language (celebrated as a national holiday) • 1971 Brozovic “Ten Theses on the Croatian Standard Language”

  6. 5.2 The new Croatian • Promoters of a separate Croatian language created documents so controversial they were banned by Tito, among them: • 1971 Zagreb Hrvatski pravopis, republished in London in 1972 and in Croatia in 1994 • Brozovic’s 10 Theses promoted Croatian linguistic purism, basing language on Neo-Štokavian ijekavian, using dialect words instead of borrowings where possible, and otherwise making borrowings conform to Croatian standards

  7. 5.2.1 The Čakavian & Kajkavian lexical stock • The ideal of the Neo-Štokavian ijekavian base enriched by dialect words remains and ideal, but little has been done to achieve it since the 1960s • There is very little of Čakavian & Kajkavian lexicon in Croatian, nor are there phonological and morphological features

  8. 5.2.2 Infusing the new standard with native Croatian forms • Supposedly most striking differences between Croatian and Serbian are lexical, involving 20-25K words (many of which are very similar to Serbian, however) • If words are borrowed, they must be accommodated to Croatian phonology -- this is more easily accomplished by borrowing from Greek & Latin than from English, French, and German • Croatian is more tolerant toward French, Italian, Hungarian borrowings, less tolerant toward Turkish (Islamic) and Russian (Orthodox) -- they thus align themselves with W Europe and divorce themselves from both Serbian & Bosnian

  9. 5.3 Recent orthographic controversies • 2000-2001 -- two competing orthographies published: • Hrvatski pravopis (Institute for the Croatian Language) -- prescriptivist (conservative, nationalist) • Zagreb University -- descriptivist (revolutionary, non-nationalist)

  10. 5.3.1 The prescriptivist Pravopis (HP) • A Croat reaction to the joint pravopis resulting from the 1954 Novi Sad agreement • Banned and destroyed in 1972; published in Croatia (Yugoslavia) in 1990; endorsed by Croatian Ministry of Education and Sports in 1996 • Strove to eliminate variation in grammatical endings, assert some morphological spellings, replace Serbian words with Croatian ones

  11. 5.3.2 The descriptivist Pravopis (PHJ) • Revision of a 1986 text reflecting Croatian usage within a unified Serbo-Croatian • Spirit of tolerance, embracing variations in use, avoiding strict rules and purism

  12. Reactions to HP and PHJ • HP nationalists vs. PHJ non-nationalists • PHJ attacked by HP supporters as ignoring 11 centuries of Croatian orthographic tradition • PHJ supporters found HP excessively restrictive and reminiscent of fascist trends • Tudjman government proposed (but did not pass) a Law on the Defense of the Croatian Language (punishments for linguistic transgressions, purging of “non-Croatian” words)

  13. 5.4 Conclusions • Brozovic, commenting on fact that Croatian is asserted as separate, despite lack of real distinctiveness: “The rights of a certain language cannot be determined by the fact that it is more or less similar, completely dissimilar, or very similar to some other language. That would be just as senseless and unacceptable as if in human society we would deny civil rights to fraternal or identical twins.”

  14. 5.4 Conclusions, cont’d. • But Croat linguists and nationalists could no longer feel comfortable with the notion of “standard twin languages” • It is easier to change how people write than to change how they speak, so focusing on orthographic changes was most efficient way to achieve distinctiveness • Implementation of prescriptivist norms in schools may ultimately lead to changes in spoken language

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