Language standardization and state building in the former Yugoslavia
Keywords:
nationalism, language, dialect, identity, historical narrativeAbstract
The ethnic groups among the South Slavs, those that were part of the former Yugoslavia, were mostly members of a linguistic core formed around a single language composed of two variants known under the name Serbo-Croatian – Croatian Serbian (srpskohrvatski – hrvatskosrpski) .1 From the founding of socialist Yugoslavia until its end, two opposing ideological forces (centrifugal and centripetal), concentrated around Belgrade, on the one hand, and Zagreb on the other, orbited the ruling Communist party. These frequently generated political crises that not infrequently became national, ethnic and/or cultural crises, therefore, linguistic ones. This hindered and damaged the development of a common Yugoslav narrative. When Yugoslav communism collapsed and new nation states emerged amid ethnic conflicts, the nationalist logic of mutual exclusion and maximum distinction forced linguistic violation, so each language would have to be named according to the ethnic group that used it. Since then, terms such as Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian refer, paradoxically, to different but equal languages.
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