The Role of Language in the Creation of Identity: Myths in ... - CiteSeerX

Faculty International Studies Seminar, University of Kansas: “Reinvention of Tradition,” April 1996, convened by Dr. Terry Widener.

The Role of Language in the Creation of Identity: Myths in Linguistics among the Peoples of the Former Yugoslavia Marc L. Greenberg, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures ** fatefully tied, and that they will either stand or fall along with it.” (Toporišič 1982: 459)

“If a union of all the Serbo-Croatian speaking peoples is ever realized, that is a genuine union satisfactory to both Croatians and Serbians, it will be a remarkable victory of an originally intellectual movement, operating upon linguistic kinship, over exceptional obstacles” (Buck 1916: 66)

“Everybody agrees in Serbia that it would be ideal to elaborate an amended [Serbo-Croatian] orthography for the whole [Serbo-Croatian-speaking] territory, following joint or at least co-ordinated work of experts. However, until recently this has been impossible, mainly because of the unwillingness of Croatian colleagues to co-operate.” (Ivić 1992: 108)

“...it was the great achievement of the communist regimes in multinational countries to limit the disastrous effects of nationalism within them.” (Hobsbawm 1990: 173)

“Ostanite doma in na svojih delovnih mestih. Ne dovolite [sic] da vas zlorabljajo [sic] zoper vaših življenjskih interesov. [...] Vsak odpor bo zlomljen.” [Stay home and at your places of work. Do not allow anyone to abuse [sic] you against your vital interests. [...] Any resistance will be crushed.” (Excerpt from a flyer, written in grammatically and stylistically compromised Slovene, dropped from a Yugoslav Peoples’ Army airplane over Slovenia, June 26, 1991.)

“The Slovene literary language is alive and well in the Republic of Slovenia in Yugoslavia, where it is functionally almost completely self-contained and whose speakers are politically, and more especially, economically successful, culturally and in civilizational terms, above the average Yugoslav. However, [the Slovenes] are still all too unaware that it is their literary language to which they are

** Preliminaries Commenting on the taking of U.N. hostages by the Bosnian Serbs, Slobodan Milošević in an interview in Time asserted that “[w]e had to do whatever we could just to eliminate that dirty story from the history of Serbs” (Gaines, et al. 1995: 28). This statement is most revealing about the Serbian perception of the events in the Balkans: history is now, and history can and should be manipulated to accrue to the benefit of the nation. What has remained enigmatic to much of the world is the fact that, to the Serbs, history is a largely atemporal (or panchronic) phenomenon and, furthermore, one of utmost significance to everyday people. As Vermeer observes, “[t]o an outsider, it is quite astonishing to see that the popular press in Yugoslavia is full of interviews with historians and similar people, evidently not because the public is really interested in what happened in the past, but because it is thought that past facts are somehow more important than present reality” (1992: 104). Because of this emphasis on the past and its projection onto the present, history in the former Yugoslavia plays a central role in shaping contemporary national attitudes. Of particular significance is language history, not only because of the (very important) symbolic function that language has in shaping national identity, but also because linguists can authoritatively advance claims about the links between language and territory in the past, that

Marc L. Greenberg, Dept. of Slavic Languages & Literatures

is, create language myths. This in turn can have an effect on what people believe about their language, their past, and their national identity. 1 As Ferguson pointed out almost 40 years ago, “[I]n every speech community attitudes and beliefs are probably current about the language of the community as well as about other languages and language in general. Some of these are true, i.e. correspond very well to objective reality, others are involved with esthetic or religious notions the validity of which cannot be investigated emprically, and still others which purport to deal with facts are partly or wholly false” (1959/1968: 375). This is the sense in which the topic of myths will be investigated here, i.e., ideas about language that people have that may be true, false, or somewhere in between. However, here, rather than examine the spectrum of beliefs that people hold about their language, the intermediary role of native linguists in shaping language myths will be considered. This is relevant because linguists’ argumentation is too technical for the layman to penetrate and, as a consequence, their claims may go largely unquestioned and the advancement of both good and faulty ideas can be absorbed into the collective consciousness without a critical filter. In the case of the Slavic peoples of the former Yugoslavia, who speak languages that stand in close genetic relationship to one another and have a high degree of mutual intelligibility, the linguistic component of historical interpretation turns on subtle differences. The similarities among these languages made possible a 19th-century (failed) attempt at language unification, the Illyrian Movement. Although the political analogue of this movement, a unified state of Yugoslavia, persisted for more than seventy years (1918–1991), during which attempts had been made to unify the languages, the differences among them have prevailed decisively. Although it is too early (and, for the moment, too monumental a task) to assess objectively all of the underlying causes of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, it does not seem extravagant to advance the idea that linguists played a not insignificant role in defining national consciousness and hence were part of the disintegrative process. For the discussion below it will be necessary to dwell for a moment on some terminological points (though we will dispense with technical sociolinguistic terms). A central issue in the question of cultural myths in South Slavic linguistics is the tension between the fuzzy notions of language and dialect. The partly facetious diagnostic that a “language is a dialect with an army” is appropriate to the extent that it emphasizes that a dialect can be elevated to the status of a language when it is supported by the state. However, this is hardly an adequate definition. One could cite the Lusatian Sorbs, who are a Slavic people settled along the Spree River in what used to be East Germany. The Sorbs, an ethnolinguistic group numbering under 70,000, are speakers of two closely related languages, Upper and Lower Sorbian. Their varieties of speech are used in literature, theater, radio, television and print media, and speakers have at their disposal a range of written and spoken registers. Consequently, Upper and Lower Sorbian must be considered languages. Yet, they have never possessed a state and are unlikely to do so. On the other hand, Macedonian, which one certainly must consider a language with a state (now with its own army), cannot be separated on structural criteria from Bulgarian, with which it makes a coherent dialect continuum. This suggests that the distinction between language and dialect (variant) is not one of linguistically-definable structural contrast, but of perspective. In particular, one can view things from: (1) a political perspective (Is it the official or dominant language of a political entity?); (2) a functional/cultural perspective (Is it used in literature, science, the 2

Marc L. Greenberg, Dept. of Slavic Languages & Literatures

media?); (3) a historical perspective (Does it relate to other languages in an earlier period? Can it be linked to a glorious past?); (4) a structural perspective (Is there a high degree of mutual intelligibility? Does the dialect geography suggest strong or weak differentiation from its neighbors?); (5) a perspective of beliefs (Do its speakers believe they are speaking a language or a dialect?). Thus, for example, one can rightfully call Macedonian a language in terms of (1), (2), and (5), but with respect to (3) and (4) Macedonian must be viewed as part of a genetic and typological grouping that contains both Bulgarian and Macedonian. It goes (almost) without saying that none of these perspectives is an independent or impermeable category, but rather, they are all interrelated in complex ways. Moreover, the question of language vs. dialect is not merely an academic one. In the South Slavic world (though not only there), where language (in the narrow sense of “standard” or “literary” language) is a marker of prestige and dialect is neutral or lacking prestige, language represents power, independence, sometimes also domination, dialect represents local sub-national identity, in essence, subordination. Because the categories fade into each other, language planners, and, as we shall see, even linguists not directly inolved in language planning, have been keen to sharpen the distinctions and thus to shore up the beliefs relating to the status of language. This paper examines some of the contributions that native linguists have made to the Yugoslav peoples’ beliefs about their languages and, consequently, the role of linguists in building and fortifying national identity. A thumbnail historical sketch of Yugoslavia The state of Yugoslavia that existed from 1918 until 1991 was made up of four major Slavic ethnolinguistic groups, from north to south: Slovenes, Croats, Serbs (= Serbs + Montenegrins), and Macedonians. A religious group, the Slavic Muslims (Muslimani), though regarded as a separate national entity, nevertheless shared its language (with minor differences in usage) with the Serbs and Croats, and only since the recent Bosnian War has it begun to elaborate its own standard language (Bosnian, bosanski jezik). Macedonian, which gained the status of a standard language in 1944, became the official language of the Yugoslav Federal Republic of Macedonia and is now the state language of the independent Republic of Macedonia (also known as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia). In addition, significant non-Slavic minorities are settled among the Slavic population. Particularly numerous are the Hungarians of Vojvodina and the Albanians of Kosova (see Appendices 1, 2; Maps 1, 2). The Slovenes, Croats and Serbs of today descend from the Slavic peoples who migrated from north of the western foothills of the Carpathians and settled in the Eastern Alps in the north and the hinterlands east of the Dinaric Alps in the 6th-7th centuries AD. 2 They lie west of another group of southward-migrating Slavs who were to become the Macedonians and Bulgarians and remained for a time separated from the western group by Balkan Latin (later Romanian) and Albanian speakers until these two latter groups gradually receded (through assimilation to the Slavic population) to roughly the present-day western Romanian border and the eastern borders of the province of Kosovo and the Republic of Albania. From a structural viewpoint, Macedonian and Bulgarian are characterized by numerous grammatical parallelisms and lexical similarities to the languages of the Balkan convergence area (Sprachbund), which include also the non-Slavic languages Romanian, Albanian, Greek, and to an extent, Turkish (for an overview see Friedman 1986). Slovene, Croatian and Serbian are characterized both by a number of common structural innovations 3

Marc L. Greenberg, Dept. of Slavic Languages & Literatures

and the fact that they lie outside of (Slovene, Croatian) or on the periphery (Serbian) of the Balkan convergence area. For the historical reasons just mentioned, the South Slavic area is discussed linguistically in terms of two subgroups: western-South Slavic (Slovene, Croatian, Serbia) and eastern-South Slavic or Balkan Slavic (Macedonian, Bulgarian). For the present discussion we shall leave the Balkan group aside and focus on the western group. Map 1: The former Yugoslavia Austria Hungary Ljubljana Zagreb

Italy

Slovenia

Vojvodina

Croatia

Belgr a de

Bosnia & Herzegovina Sarajevo

Serbia

Split

Ni£

Adriatic Sea Montenegro Podgorica

Kosova

Bulgaria

Prishtina Skopje

Albania Macedonia

Greece

Although it is difficult to establish the details, it is generally assumed that during the period following the migrations to the Eastern Alps and the Balkan Peninsula there must have been some degree of discontinuity in the settlement of smaller subgroups of the western South Slavs, which gave rise to early dialect differentiation reflected today in the Slovene language and the three major dialects of the Croats and Serbs: Čakavian, Kajkavian and Štokavian (characterized symbolically by the form of the interrogative pronoun ‘what’: ča, kaj, and što, respectively) (see Maps 1, 2). 3 The Štokavian and Čakavian areas are further subdivided into smaller groups based on the reflex of the Common Slavic vowel “jat” (symbolized as ě), which are referred to as Ikavian (“i-saying”), Ekavian and Ijekavian. However, whatever discontinuity might have existed became obscured as the populations increased, spread, and came in contact with one another, giving rise to transitional areas among the dialects. Both the Čakavian- and Kajkavian-speaking areas have literary traditions, the Čakavian having reached its zenith in the Renaissance; the Kajkavian tradition remained fragmented and was oriented to still smaller subdialects through its history. The 4

Marc L. Greenberg, Dept. of Slavic Languages & Literatures

Štokavian and Čakavian dialect areas expanded west- and northward in the 15th to 19th centuries in reaction to Turkish domination, in part at the expense of the Kajkavian dialect area (Ivić 1972: 72ff, 1986: 49ff, 331). As a result the Štokavian dialect area covers a far greater territory than it had prior to the 15th c. and both the Čakavian and Kajkavian territories must have been substantially larger, extending eastwards. There does not exist a close fit between these dialects and the modern ethnic groups and nations: Serbs are speakers of Štokavian Ekavian and Ijekavian; Montenegrins of Štokavian Ijekavian; Croats of Kajkavian, Čakavian, and Štokavian Ikavaian and Ijekavian; Muslims speak Štokavian Ijekavian. In turn, the Kajkavian and Čakavian dialects form a bridge to Slovene. The Štokavian dialect area blends into Macedonian and Bulgarian through the transitional Torlak dialect in southern Serbia. Map 2: Languages of the former Yugoslavia (with dialects of Serbo-Croatian)

Ljublja na Zagreb

Hungarian Slovene

Ijekavian

Ekavian

Belgrade

Ijekavian

Ek av ian

Ikavian

‹ to k a v ia n Sarajevo

Ik avian

Ekavian

Spli t

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Ijekavian € akavian Kajkavian Ijekavian

dialects of ‹ tokavian

Ijekavian

Albanian

Podgorica

Prishtina

T orlak

Skopje

Macedonian

Local literary traditions, at times stronger than others, sprang up in each of these areas, so that one may speak of a Renaissance Čakavian, a Baroque Kajkavian as well as several local Štokavian literatures. Up through the early 19th century the Serbs used as a standard language Slaveno-Serbian, an amalgam of Serbian Church Slavic, with a large Russian and Church Slavic lexical component, and Štokavian Serbian. In the early part of the 19th century, due largely to the activity of the Serbian philologist and folklorist Vuk Karadžić, the élitist and artificial Slaveno-Serbian was replaced by a standard language closely 5

Marc L. Greenberg, Dept. of Slavic Languages & Literatures

reflecting the Štokavian Ijekavian speech of Karadžić’s native Eastern Herzegovinian dialect. Later, the Ekavian variety of Štokavian, characteristic of Belgrade speech and the majority of Serbs, replaced Ijekavian as the Serbian variety of the standard language. In the 1820-1830’s in Croatia and, to a lesser extent, Slovenia, a movement to unify all of the South Slavic languages into a single standard, a something like a South-Slavic Esperanto, grew out of the Pan-Slavic Illyrian movement. The Illyrian movement failed after some attempts to forge grammars and produce an instant literature. However, a leading proponent of this movement, the Croatian (Kajkavian-speaking) philologist, Ljudevit Gaj, eventually agreed to adopt Štokavian as the common standard language of all Croats and Serbs, codified in the Literary Agreement of 1850. This unification in turn closed the door to the further incorporation of Slovene, which at this time was reaching its own synthesis around the figure of the Slovene Romantic poet Francè Prešeren. Although centripetal forces were in place from the beginning, the abandonment of Čakavian and Kajkavian as models for a literary language and the adoption of Štokavian meant the beginning of an idealized entity known as Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian. During 19th c. , the establishment of the Cyrillic alphabet as currently used in Serbia and Montenegro was established, as well as the Latin orthography now used Croatia and Bosnia (including the diacritics č, š, ž, ć, already in use in Czech and, with respect to the last letter, Polish). Karadžić’s fundamental grammatical principal was “Write as you speak”; as democratic as this may sound, it really only referred to the phonetic spelling principle, since only those speakers who had a native command of the Eastern Herzegovinian dialect could write as they spoke. Fully a half-century passed before the general principles of Karadžić’s grammar were accepted by Croats with the publication of Tomo Maretić’s 1899 grammar. This meant the agreement on matters of phonology (sounds), grammatical categories, but the two variants continued to develop in divergent manners. The Serbian variant remained open to borrowings for new vocabulary, building on the already considerable Turkish lexicon. Croats have advocated neologisms, rather than borrowings, for new terms (cf. Serbian avion ‘airplane,’ Croatian zrakoplov ‘airplane’