Politics Of Language in the Balkans
Posted by Jaiken Struck on February 23rd, 2009In the Balkans, language and politics are closely intertwined, and a region that was once seen as speaking a single common language now argues that it has as many as four native tongues – Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin. The post-Yugoslav period of heightened national awareness has seen an evolution in the local languages. Never mind that a Serb from Banja Luka and a Croat from Dubrovnik can carry on a conversation and understand each other perfectly.
If asked in each other’s company what language they are speaking, they’d be likely to answer: “our language” – the nation-neutral answer that has become a form of courtesy in the ethnically divided region. Privately, however, everyone acknowledges the differences. As the former Yugoslavia has broken down into individual, ethnically based countries, federations, and districts, the single composite language once known as Serbo-Croatian has broken down into what its speakers say are individual, ethnically based languages.
The distinctions sometimes reach extremes even locals find absurd. Streets signs often give multiple versions of the same designation, to accommodate all likely users. Bookworms look for translated works by writers from neighboring states. Films produced in Serbia are released elsewhere in the Balkans with subtitles.
Linguist Zhivko Bjelanovic says to the trained eye, the languages are fundamentally distinct. “Serbs and Croats can understand each other on the level of basic communication. But when experts start to actually analyze the languages, there are in fact a lot of differences — in grammar, syntax, and every other way,” Bjelanovic says.
Croatians have coined entirely new words, Bosniaks have peppered their speech with Turkic terms and phrases, and Serbs throughout the region remain committed to using the Cyrillic alphabet instead of Latin script. August Kovacec, a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Art, says it is unlikely the people of the region will ever agree to return to a unified language.
Egon Fekete, a linguist in Belgrade, says most academics still say a single language is spoken in the Balkans — albeit one with numerous variations. But he says the issue is more about politics than it is about language. “In our region, political concerns outweigh everything else, and because of that, everyone has to have their own nation, religion, language, and alphabet. And that’s not good,” Fekete says.
Others say that although the languages have different names now, they are still all the same language. It’s a language everyone in the Balkans understands perfectly well.
Read more: Radio Free Europe
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