С једног језика на три : премоћ политике над лингвистиком

Abstract

The author talks about the strong, often decisive influence of politics

upon the development and understanding of language opportunities, upon a specific spite of political history, which, in the case of the standard language of Serbs and Croats, was so superiourly victorios in its battle with language history. The political motifs stand in the basis of decisions of Croatian Parlament, i. e. of determination of Croat national movement at the end of 19" century, which took the Vukovian (Serbian) model of the literary language and made the Croatian language standard of it, 1. e. the Croatian literary language, of course with the already existing Croatian terminology. That historic act produced the national croatization of all Stokavian speaking Roman Catholics and abolished the possibility of Kajkavian or Cakavian dialects to carry the burden of Croatian language standardization. The author agrees with the opinion of Pavle Ivic, the most outstanding Serbian linguist in the 2" half of the 20" century, that the “abandonment of Kajkavian literary language was the most brilliant political move the civil Zagreb had ever made’. One might say now that at first one language was chosen by Croats among the three ones (Stokavian, Kajkavian, adn Cakavian), and a century later - the chosen one (Stokavian) was sociolinguistically divided into three ones. It is of course another thing that the three “new” national standrads - Serbian, Croatian, and Bosniac - represent the same standard language system without any serious changes after the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, the same standard language with three different names, “the same language’, in terms of the Croatian linguist Dalibor Brozovic, “in the meaning of - that one, but not the other language, and not the same one in the meaning of - such one, but not the different language’. So, it 1s even nowadays the question of the same standard language, whose national variaties are formally called languages, among which the last one belonging to Bosniacs - with the obvious terminological error in view of the fact that there are three Bosnian varieties, three Bosnian (and Herzegovinian) languages m Bosnia and Herzegovina and elsewhere. The persistence of Bosniacs with the name of “Bosnian language’ may, naturally, bear only the bad mood with peace-making Serbs and Croats, who - with their insisting on the only acceptable label: the Bosniac language - practically play the role of protectors of Bosniac national identity of Slav Muslims, designated as Bosniacs after the war in 1992-1995.