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Language
Srbija Danas - 13.04.2003 14:23
Language in the former Yugoslavia
Ever since Yugoslavia was created there was the problem of the language. This already started in the 1900's. What used to be known as Serbian and which was spoken both by the Serbs are Croats during the 1800's became Serbo-Croatian in the 1900's, to please both parties. Although there was no real difference with the language's it was more a political ideology that was connected to ethnicity.
Now that Yugoslavia no longer exists we see another trend, that has been developing over the years now. Language pluralism in Bosnia and Herzegovina is the latest development. More and more the different states in what was Yugoslavia, are artificially showing of their own "national language", which in fact do not differ at all from each other. On Micro level the language difference between Serbs, Croats and the inhabitants of Bosnia are only present on the social position of a person disregarded of his ethnic / religious background. Before the war this difference was negligible.
After the war the process started. Serbs spoke Serbian and the Croats Croatian. They left the term Serbo-Croatian dead, and did not want to use it just merely to show to the other how much they disliked each other. But the Bosnians, not a ethnic group were in between, and started to create their own language. The main reason was that every nation has a right to its own language. So Philologists tried to give the language its own character by adding / changing the phonetics. The major change in Bosnia was that they added the "h" in the word kafa "coffee" making it khafa. More Turkish and Arab/Persian words were introduced with the final goal to make Bosnian more indigenous and to give it its own idiomatic character.
It is clear that these attempts to create a standard language is both artificial and nationalistic of character. And it does on no way compare to the natural development of linguistic varieties. A similar attempt was undertaken in Moldavia, where they tried to sever Moldavian from Romanian.
In the end this will only have a negative effect on the national conciseness of the Bosnian national.
This new fashion of language changing even goes that far that the Croatian Vice President ( Peter Milic ) during a trial in Sarajevo refused to testify because he couldn't understand Bosnian, while there is no difference between that and his own mother tongue. See it as American versus English
There is one light point though in this region where language and religious identification is connected with ethnic identification. Journalists don't integrate these new words, and e.g. the newspaper Oslobodenje is a example of this.
No matter what the outcome is. Before I spoke only 1 language. Nowadays I speak about 4 extra without learning for it! It looks great on my resume!!
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