The European Un-ion has a new member! Croatia was one of the states created as a result of the Yugoslav wars.
Yugoslavia was a multinational and multilingual state, but it is often forgotten that the most cruel battles in those wars were fought between enemies who were, basically, not divided by language.
If you are a learned linguist who does not pay heed to the claims of nationalists, it’s not possible to argue that Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian are different languages (and that the old name ‘Serbo-Croatian’ is just fine to use even today), although few people down there admit it today.
Anyone who takes a look at textbooks teaching Serbo-Croatian – or ‘Serbian or Croatian’, as textbook authors today prefer to say, for the sake of the Balkan idea of political correctness – soon finds out that the language has three primary dialects, Shtokavian, Kaikavian and Chakavian, the names of which are based on the way to say ‘what’ or ‘which’ in the dialects.
It is another story, however, that Kaikavian and Chakavian are only spoken in Croatia. The written standard is based on Shtokavian in Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia, although the standard languages do exhibit obvious differences. For instance, the names of the chemical elements are different in Croatian and in Serbian, according to the national standards.
In places with a mixed population, Croats, Serbs and Bosnians spoke the same language. However, official language planning in Serbia and Croatia stressed different approaches to the language. In Croatia, language purification had a stronger role, while Serbs preferred to give official recognition to loan words if they had been accepted in the spoken vernacular. For instance, Serbs use international names for the months of the year, while Croatian prefers its own set of Slavic names.
Today, in every country where some sort of Serbo-Croatian is spoken, there are ongoing attempts to make the standards as unintelligible as possible for the speakers of other ‘languages’ concerned. This is an understandable consequence of the cruel wars in the 1990s, but in any case the linguist and the reader of Serbo-Croatian literature must deplore this development.
Lots of interesting novels have been written in Serbo-Croatian, with skilled storytellers working in the language: Danilo Kis, Milos Crnjanski, Milorad Pavic and Ivo Andric, the literature Nobel Laureate of 1961. It would be a great loss if these writers were forgotten because their language and style do not correspond to the new standards.
Panu Petteri Höglund is an Irish-language writer from Finland who has studied Slavic studies.
