Language Discourse and Borders in the Yugoslav Successor States 9781853597336

Table of contents :
Contents
Chapter 1. Language Boundaries as Social, Political and Discursive Constructs
Chapter 2. A Linguist on the Train to Vienna
Chapter 3. Language and Boundaries in the Yugoslav Context
Chapter 4. Troubled Multicultural Broadcasting in Macedonia
Chapter 5. Debate
Chapter 6. Language, Ethnicity and Cultural Boundaries in Ukraine: A Response to the Papers and Debate
Chapter 7. Language, Borders, Identity: A Response to Ranko Bugarski
Chapter 8. Semantics of War in Former Yugoslavia: A Response to the Papers and Debate

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Language, Discourse and Borders in the Yugoslav Successor States

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Language, Discourse and Borders in the Yugoslav Successor States Edited by

Brigitta Busch and Helen Kelly-Holmes

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Language, Discourse and Borders in the Yugoslav Successor States/Edited by Brigitta Busch and Helen Kelly-Holmes. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Former Yugoslav republics–Languages–Political aspects. 2. Former Yugoslav republics–Boundaries. 3. Nationalism–Former Yugoslav republics. 4. Mass media and language–Former Yugoslav republics. 5. Former Yugoslav republics–Politics and government. I. Busch, Brigitta. II. Kelly-Holmes, Helen P119.32.Y8L36 2004 409'.497–dc22 2004002829 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1-85359-732-5 (hbk) Multilingual Matters Ltd UK: Frankfurt Lodge, Clevedon Hall, Victoria Road, Clevedon BS21 7HH. USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA. Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario M3H 5T8, Canada. Copyright © 2004 Brigitta Busch, Helen Kelly-Holmes and the authors of individual chapters. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. Typeset by Patrick Armstrong Book Production Services. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd.

Contents 1 Language Boundaries as Social, Political and Discursive Constructs Brigitta Busch and Helen Kelly-Holmes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 A Linguist on the Train to Vienna Dubravko S˘kiljan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 3 Language and Boundaries in the Yugoslav Context Ranko Bugarski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 4 Troubled Multicultural Broadcasting in Macedonia Dona Kolar-Panov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 5 Debate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 6 Language, Ethnicity and Cultural Boundaries in Urkraine: A Response to the Papers and Debate Tatiana Zhurzhenko . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 7 Language, Borders, Identity: A Response to Ranko Bugarski Marija Mitrovic´ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 8 Semantics of War in Former Yugoslavia: A Response to the Papers and Debate Melitta Richter Malabotta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

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Language Boundaries as Social, Political and Discursive Constructs BRIGITTA BUSCH University of Vienna, Austria. HELEN KELLY-HOLMES University of Limerick, Ireland. The complex and highly charged issue of whether languages cause borders or borders cause languages was at the heart of much of the debate between linguists, political scientists, activists and educators during the Current Issues in Language and Society seminar in Vienna in September 2002, the papers and debate for which form the basis of this volume. Does language create, in a Herderian sense, a natural division that is then, by logical extension, supported by an ethno-linguistic border and a separated state; or is it, instead, the imposition of borders and the desire for a separate state that demands the codification of a separate language as one of the key defining features of a proto-nationalist state? In our introduction to this issue, which presents a range of papers and debate on language and media policies, we want to situate the debate on language policies in South-eastern Europe within the larger debate in social sciences and humanities on the issues of borders and the formation of national identities. We will argue that in these debates a change of paradigms is taking place, questioning the central role of the (nation-) state as the main point of departure in research. This shift of paradigms is expressed in current border studies (Newman & Paasi, 1998) as well as in approaches in which the state is also seen as an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1983), as a ‘narration of the nation’ (Hall, 1995) and in approaches analysing discursive constructions of national identity (Wodak et al., 1999). Questioning the central role of the nation state also means questioning some of the basic assumptions that have been taken for granted in dealing with social processes. In our introduction we will concentrate on the discursive dimension of the drawing of (language) borders and on the key role media play in such a process.

State Borders as Social, Political and Discursive Constructs The principle that political borders were inviolable dominated the political order in post-war Europe for many decades. However the events of the last 20 years have brought this basic principle into question. On the one hand, the end of the bipolar world order has resulted in the break-up of larger state forms such as the Soviet Union and the Yugoslav federation and their division into a number of individual states, which are constituted along nation-state lines. On the other, the process of European integration and unification, although it does not do away

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totally with nation-state borders within the Union, does still destabilise the concept of nation-state borders from a supranational level. On a more general, worldwide level, there is the role played by globalisation in this process. Parallel to this, the local/regional is enjoying a new relevance and is in this way also contributing to the destabilising of nation-state borders. Discussions of territorial boundaries by academic geographers date back to the late 19th and early 20th century. Most of the early literature is descriptive rather than theoretical, and based on deterministic notions of ‘natural’ boundaries. The discussion of the role of boundaries has been closely connected with the ideas of territory, territoriality and sovereignty. The (nation) state as a bounded unit has been taken for granted as a point of departure for research, and social sciences have largely operated within the assumption of an unproblematic division of space and within the context of ‘naturally’ discontinuous territories (Newman & Paasi, 1998: 195). In recent (interdisciplinary) debates, a change of paradigms can be witnessed in which the meanings of boundaries and their constructedness are a focus, while the state-centric approach and the assumptions about the isomorphism of space, place and culture are being questioned. In this approach, as Newman and Paasi sum up: {S}tate borders are equally social, political and discursive constructs, not just static naturalized categories located between states. Boundaries and their meanings are historically contingent, and they are part of the production and institutionalization of territories and territoriality. Even if they are always more or less arbitrary lines between territorial entities, they may also have deep symbolic, cultural, historical and religious, often contested meanings for social communities. They manifest themselves in numerous social, political and cultural practices. (1998: 187) The consensus in social sciences that borders are not to be considered as a ‘natural’ category, but as social and political constructs is, as Pierre Bourdieu (1982: 138) states, widespread. Research dealing with aspects of discursive constructedness and the analysis of the meanings of borders is only relatively recent. Analysis of border narratives (e.g. Meinhof et al., 2001) and of political and media texts (e.g. Berg & Saima, 2000) shows that discursive constructs can emphasise or relativise and question existing political borders, which can be represented as deep and tight dividing lines or as quasi non-existent, merely administrative lines. The question of borders is closely linked to the question of national identities as ‘the discursive construction of national identity {...} is based on the formation of sameness and difference’ (Wodak et al., 1999: 30). Borders, as Étienne Balibar (1997: 377f.) develops, are ambivalent in their meanings: they are supradetermined (surdéterminé), i.e. sanctioned, fortified or relativised by other geopolitical divisions, and they are heterogeneous and polysemous in their meanings. Heterogenous in the sense that the nation state has tended to amalgamate and make coincide political borders, cultural boundaries and socio-economic borders; polysemous in the sense that a particular border can mean something different to different individuals as well as to different groups confronted with it. The drawing of borders, as Newman and Paasi (1998) critically remark, has not received sufficient attention in border studies to date. This is possibly due to the fact that research traditions and research paradigms are still to a large

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extent rooted within the nation-state principle. Investigating discursive constructions of borders and of national identities and the meanings of borders indicates that the nation-state paradigm, which has been taken for granted as the central point of departure in research, is being questioned. This opens the way for dealing with processes around the drawing and abolition of borders. In the process of disintegration of former Yugoslavia, borders were a central topic in political and media discourses. Milena Dragicˇevic-Sˇesˇ ic´ (2001) analyses the role of maps as a representation of borders: She speaks of an ‘obsession with maps’ which ‘flooded the cultural space’ (2001: 72). Such maps started to appear en masse in the 1980s in dailies and news magazines, and they came to influence the cultural policies of the republics. There were different kinds of maps: ‘ethnic’ maps, ‘historical’ maps – showing the picture of the inner borders as quite different from what then were the actual borders between Yugoslav republics. Borders also became a central topic in art, in quasi-academic theory and ethnoterritorial history, and also in mass culture e.g. in neo-folk songs, in which ‘borders became the very essence of aggressive chauvinist kitsch’ (2001: 74). She reminds us how ‘simple lines on maps became true borders, obstacles to human communication’ (2001: 75), and how ‘people have gone, been killed, expelled or forcibly settled on all sides, and mostly out of zones the maps prescribed’ (2001: 84). Summarising the findings of a discourse analytical project encompassing a huge corpus of data from media in Serbia and Croatia in the early 1990s, Alija Hodzˇic´ points out that borders were a major topic: they were reified and constructed as ‘natural’ dividing lines and had an external dimension – as a separation line between the successor states, and as an internal dimension excluding ‘others’ from the national consensus (Hodzˇic´ 2000: 24). For example, a frequent topic in the Croatian media was the question of locating the newly founded state on the imaginary geographical map: Croatia was depicted as an integral part of Europe, and Europe in turn as a centuries old Schicksalsgemeinschaft – a community determined by historical destiny – based on Christian values (Skopljanac Brunner et al., 2000). The borders towards ‘Europe’ were constructed as quasi non-existent, although in practice they were often difficult to cross due to the imposition of visa requirements for citizens of almost all of the successor states of former Yugoslavia, whereas the borders with the neighbouring states were represented as tight and as lines of absolute division (Busch, 2001: 152). In his essay ‘Qu‘est-ce qu‘une frontière?’ Étienne Balibar posits that borders take on a religious nature in the quest for absolute nature – a lay, secularised religion, a religion of language, of the education system, of a shared constitution. In the space of former Yugoslavia several of these factors were brought together, and language was one of them. The demarcation of ‘language boundaries’ and the affirmation of ‘language communities’ were central concepts in political and media discourses on language in the disintegration phase.

Language Boundaries and the Territorial Dimension The representation of language boundaries, the linkage between language and territory, and thus the notion of linguistic boundaries with a territorial dimension has a certain tradition in linguistics. The first documents of

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linguistic cartography date back to the late 18th and early 19th century (Melis, 1996: 175), the period of the affirmation of the nation state as a principle of political and social order and division, a period when the one-language, onenation idea gained importance. Maps used in dialectology are based on information gathered from carefully chosen informants (mostly elderly people in rural areas who have not left their settlements). They show a network of isoglosses which indicate the territorial distribution of particular systemic features (phonological, morphological, lexical) and depict idioms as continua rather than as clearly demarcated by borders. Although linguistic theory asserts that borders can be drawn by means of denser bundles, it does not define the density or the degree of difference that justifies the term ‘language border’. The border is not a clearly demarcated line but rather a zone of transition (Melis, 1996: 177). Chambers and Trudgill (1980) suggest defining the notion of language border within a continuum as the moment when total communication breakdown occurs. This is, however, equally problematic, since intercomprehension also depends on communication interests and not only on ‘objective’ factors. Another type of map represents languages (or rather standard varieties) as coherent entities occupying defined territories. They mainly denote where officially recognised languages (often state languages and minority languages) apply, and they are based on a definition of languages into which extralinguistic political criteria enter (Edwards, 1985). Both forms of map can only represent particular aspects of the linguistic situation and so necessarily neglect other factors such as second language acquisition, the presence of immigrant groups, communities without territories (e.g. Romanies), the language of urban populations and other dimensions of poly- and heteroglossia within speech communities. The territorial projection of language boundaries on maps is firmly rooted within the monolingual paradigm in which monolingualism is taken as ‘unmarked’ and multilingualism is treated as the exception.

The Social and Political Dimension of Speech Communities and Language Boundaries In linguistic theory, the assumption of a speech community is taken for granted as a frame of departure for research. Such an assumption implies that the social, cultural and territorial spaces in which people live can be differentiated according to linguistic criteria; it implies therefore some notion of boundedness. There have been different approaches towards a definition of speech community:1 one approach takes ‘interaction by means of speech’ (Bloomfield, 1933: 42) or, more narrowly, direct and indirect communication via the common language, as the characterising feature. Fishman points out that the notion of speech community is not necessarily tied to the use of a single speech variety, but rather to ‘density of communication and/or symbolic integration {...} regardless of the number of varieties employed’ (Fishman, 1971: 234). Other approaches are centred on ‘shared social attitudes towards language’ (Labov, 1972: 120) or are based on the self-evaluation of speakers ‘who regard themselves as using the same language’ (Halliday et al., 1964: 140 cf. Dittmar, 1997: 133).

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The definition of speech community beyond the purpose of defining it for a particular research project encounters substantial difficulties. Authors point out that extralinguistic criteria enter into such definitions: for instance, Bloomfield concedes that his definition is only of relative value, since cleavages between adjoining speech-forms can be primarily of political and not linguistic nature. Furthermore, as the possibility of communication can range from zero to delicate adjustment (Bloomfield, 1933), Fishman mentions social and cultural criteria which enter into the notion of speech community and make the definition problematic (1971). Dittmar (1997) underlines the importance of a historical dimension within the notion of speech community and suggests differentiating between speech community and communication community. There seems to be a large consensus that speech community is also, or even primarily, a social and political construct. States are still major players in language policy because they can impose laws and regulations on language use. The equation of one state=one nation=one language has been extremely influential in the process of affirmation of nation states, and there has been a strong tendency to design language policies on the state level in such a way that state and language borders coincide. Homogenisation within state borders together with demarcation towards the outside have resulted in language policies that consider monolingualism as the norm and multilingualism as the exception, or even the problematic case. It would be beyond the scope of this introduction to enter into any details about the one-language, one-nation debate which has become an important issue in the last years. The nation state as the central principle of social and political organisation and division and, consequently, the monolingual paradigm, which is inextricably linked to such a principle, are increasingly being questioned in different subdisciplines of linguistics. This has, as Michael Clyne points out, far-reaching consequences, since ‘theoretical models in linguistics are based on monolingual norms’ (1996: 13).

The Discursive Constructedness of Language Boundaries In his essays developing the theory of the ‘linguistic market’, Pierre Bourdieu (1982) deals with the social dimension of ethnic conflicts. He situates the drawing of (language) boundaries within the field of power conflict in which social groups are not something given, but instead something constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed. He emphasises that this is linked with a particular vision of the world affirmed by demarcation from other world visions, and that there is a dialectic relationship between these world visions and social practices. This encompasses a dimension of discursive constructedness, since discursive acts are one form of social practice through which ‘social actors constitute objects of knowledge, situations and social roles as well as identities’ and also because discursive acts are socially constitutive in a variety of ways being largely responsible for the production, the maintenance as well as the transformation of social conditions. As Wodak et al., put it,‘ (...) through linguistic representation in various dialogic contexts, discursive practices may influence the formation of groups’ (1999: 8). Bourdieu speaks of ‘the accent’ being used as one of the ‘durable markers’

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in the processes of social division. ‘The accent’ (or in other words a particular code or language variety) is not only a durable marker, an element in the construction of difference, but also functions as a unitary language within the (posited) group. Bakhtin stresses that unitary language is not something given, but instead something posited and ideologically loaded, something that needs to be policed: A unitary language is not something given (dan) but is always in essence posited (zadan) – and at every moment of its life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia. (...) We are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life. Thus a unitary language gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization, which develop in vital connection with the process of sociopolitical and cultural centralization. ( Bakhtin, 1934/1981: 270f) Drawing some tentative conclusions about language and borders from the above discussion, we can say that language boundaries are imaginary lines that run an ambiguous course. They are obviously not an easily and clearly definable linguistic category, but rather a concept into which extralinguistic factors enter. Whereas their social and political constructedness has received attention in linguistics, the discursive element in the construction, maintenance, displacement and softening of language boundaries has been rather neglected so far. We would therefore argue that when talking about language boundaries, the notion that they are social and political as well as discursive constructs should first be considered.

The Role of Media in the Affirmation of Language Boundaries In the process of the discursive construction of national identities and of the drawing of language boundaries, media play a key role. In Europe, national radio and television have been understood as playing a dual role, serving as the political public sphere of the nation state, and as the focus for national cultural identification. {...} Broadcasting has been one of the key institutions through which listeners and viewers have come to imagine themselves as members of the national community. (Morley and Robins, 1996: 10) When we think about language boundaries in relation to media, there are several aspects that need particular attention: First of all, by using language as one of the semiotic modes in media communication, the media contribute to language change in a decisive way in that they provide linguistic resources, or as Bourdieu (1982) develops, speaking more generally about the literary field, they ‘produce means of production’, ‘word and thought associations’, and, moreover, all of the forms of discourse that are seen as ‘authoritative’, and that can be cited as examples of ‘correct language use’ (p. 35). They can therefore act as a centralising force in the constitution of what Bakhtin called ‘unitary language’. Media reach

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larger audiences and a larger spread of the population perhaps at times exceeding the reach of the education system, which is another pillar of language change initiated in a top-down way. Secondly, although media are bound by national laws and regulations determining the status of languages, such legal prescriptions normally only give a general outline, a framework in which language policies are implemented. Detailed prescriptions as quotas for the maximum use of languages other than the official in a particular media outlet are the exception rather than the rule, and concern only quantitative rather than qualitative aspects. Nevertheless, they cannot regulate which topics are treated in which language(s), which information is available in which language(s), etc. To give an example: if media or programmes in minority languages are limited to ‘minority issues’ and do not include aspects of general interest (such as geopolitics, economics, technical progress) this has considerable influence on the status of such languages and limits minority languages to a semi-private or internal group function (Busch, 1999). Media can contribute to the fragmentation of the public sphere into parallel and mutually exclusive public spheres (Husband, 2001), especially if language boundaries simultaneously become communication boundaries. This issue is taken up by Dona Kolar-Panov’s contribution to the volume with regard to the Yugoslav experience, Finally, media have always been engaged in metalinguistic discourses, not only within general reporting or within ‘letter to the editor’ pages or book reviews, but also in a specialised genre, namely language advice columns. Especially in moments when language change is being promoted from a topdown perspective and when the affirmation of language boundaries is at stake, metalinguistic discourses gain in importance and promote language awareness. They often concern normative aspects (sprachkritische) – ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ language use – as well as sociolinguistic (sprachsoziologische) aspects – which language/variety is appropriate in which situation. They can contribute to creating an environment for policing language use and for the spread of language purism. Obviously they can also challenge dominant views. In dealing with language change, metalinguistic practices and beliefs have not received the attention they merit (Cameron, 1997: 65). The analysis of metalinguistic media discourses in which academic perspectives, folk beliefs and political statements are amalgamated can shed light on processes of drawing language boundaries.

The Experience in Former Yugoslavia With regard to the Yugoslav experience, we can only highlight a number of issues, since scholarly literature analysing the situation from the angle of discourse analysis is still scarce and scattered, and different topics have been treated in relation to the different countries in South-eastern Europe. Much of the scholarly literature in linguistics about the space of former Yugoslavia has been devoted to questions of language policies and language planning under different historical circumstances (to cite but a few: monographs: Okuka, 1998; S˘ipka, 1997; readers: Bugarski/Hawkesworth, 1992; Hinrichs, 1999; Zybatov 2000). Bugarski, in this volume, provides an overview of language policy showing that phases of divergence and convergence according to different

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political parameters are characteristic for the South Slavic language space. Discourse and text-analytical research, on the other hand, has mainly concentrated on the war propaganda and hate speech. Two major international textanalytical projects were initiated and financed by Non-Governmental Organisations to investigate hate speech: the ‘Media and War’ project (Skopljanac Brunner et al., 2000) brought together a large interdisciplinary group of researchers from Croatia and Serbia. It is based on an ample corpus drawn from print media and television news programmes on the national (state) stations. A main focus is the nature of the discursive strategies employed in constructing new national identities in which strategies of creating in- and out-groups by emphasising differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ play a key role as well as strategies of internal homogenisation such as invoking ‘national unity and solidarity’, victimising one’s own group while accusing the other of aggression. Another recent major international textanalysis project in South-eastern Europe is the ‘Balkan Neighbours Project’ which involved researchers in Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, Romania, Turkey and Yugoslavia (Balkan Neighbours Newsletter, 2000/10). Between 1994 and 2000, the project monitored mainstream print media, in order to locate and analyse verbal realisations of stereotypes and prejudices within media texts. S˘kiljan (2001: 96) reminds us that the linguistic situation in the space of South Slavic languages can only be partly represented by the notion of a dialect continuum because historically there were also simultaneously different idioms present (the languages of state administrations, liturgical languages, idioms used in literary production with supradialectical or supravernacular systemic features), each with its own linguistic community (and with individuals participating in more than one community), with its own communicative efficiency and with its own symbolic power. He introduces the terms ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ border, which correspond roughly to what Kloss called Abstand- and Ausbausprachen. In the South Slavic language space language boundaries can be described as soft, because ‘comprehension is not excluded’ between different idioms, and ‘the consciousness that they are dissimilar is not selfevident’, but developed by ‘means of specific social action’ (2001: 90). After the break-up of Yugoslavia, the constitutions of the newly founded states declared Croatian (1990) and Serbian (1992) as the official languages in the respective states and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1993). With these steps, the Serbo-Croatian/Croato-Serbian language ceased to exist on the political and on the legal level. On the personal level, this meant that for official purposes (school enrolment, population census, job applications, etc.) the option of naming one’s language Serbo-Croatian no longer existed, and so a declaration of linguistic affiliation was inevitable (cf. Bugarski in this issue). Even before the disintegration of Yugoslavia, linguistic activities in the different republics had tended to emphasise differences, and in all the republics a range of standard language reference works (dictionaries, grammars, orthographies) appeared. This focus became even more intense after the break-up (Neweklowski, 2000). In Croatia, for example, in the early 1990s, a number of differential dictionaries appeared, in which words listed were

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labelled as Serbian and their Croatian equivalent given, thus marking language boundaries in the lexical field. Differential dictionaries were not an entirely new phenomenon in the area, but what was new was their number and the fact that they did not address a specialised circle (e.g. translators, linguists), but instead, with cheap pocket editions, they also targeted a large general public (Okuka, 1998: 88). Langston (1999) provides an overview of some differential dictionaries. He notes that there are significant differences between them, not only in the number of lexical items they list, but also in general orientations. One takes the language reform during the Second World War, which represented an extreme attempt at purism, as its point of reference, while others are more oriented towards the ‘Croatian literary language’. Their common denominator was to bear witness to the existence of a Croatian language and to define the boundaries in relation to the Serbian language. In political and media discourses, an environment was created that linked the use of ‘good’ and ‘pure’ Croatian with the expression of loyalty towards the Croatian state, while stigmatising ‘wrong’ language use as traitorous and ‘yugonostalgic’. ‘Wrong’ language use could entail severe consequences, for example, ethnically and politically motivated dismissals within the Croatian state radio and television were justified on the grounds of insufficient ‘knowledge of Croatian’ (Busch, 2001: 157). Okuka (1998) and Langston (1999 and 2003) cite numerous examples of metalinguistic discourses in the political sphere (speeches, declarations, party programmes) and in the media, discourse in which strategies of Abgrenzung, of emphasising language boundaries between Serbian and Croatian, of evoking an idealised past of a ‘pure’ language, are apparent. Oppositional voices were also present, especially through the weekly ‘feral tribune’, in which sarcastic comments on language purism were frequent (Busch, 2001: 158). Langston (1999) presents a study based on a corpus he obtained from text samples taken in 1996/97 from different dailies, weeklies and the daily news reports from the Croatian state news agency HINA as well as Croatian Radio and Television (HRT), which he compares to samples taken in 1985. He concludes: Noticeable changes in lexical usage in the Croatian media have indeed taken place since the break-up of the Yugoslav state, but on whole they are relatively minor. {…} Differences may also be observed in the usage of the statecontrolled or more nationalistic media versus that of the independent press. The latter continue to use some foreign words which are considered Serbian and which have been replaced by Croatian forms in the other media. (...) On the whole, however, the samples from independent press indicate that they are also following the trend towards the use of ‘authentic Croatian’ forms, albeit more slowly than the state-controlled media. (Langston, 1999: 188f.) To what extent the language reform promoted through the education system and through the public sphere actually influences language use in different situations and in different subgroups remains an open question. Not only because of the lack of empirical studies but also because of the considerable methodological difficulties such an endeavour encompasses. Jahn (1999), investigating language attitudes in the Istrian peninsula, observed consider-

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able differences according to political attitudes and generally concluded that ‘people feel linguistically insecure’ and tend to avoid the standard variety whenever possible (p. 353). Langston and Peti-Stantic´ (2003) draw from their questionnaire-based survey the preliminary conclusion that it indicates ‘a significant level of resistance towards change’ (p. 54) and that ‘Croatian language reform is still a work in progress, and it will be some time before we see what will become part of the standard language and what will be rejected.’ (p. 56). A final point is that we as linguists also need to ask ourselves difficult questions in the context of what happened to language, in language and because of language in the former Yugoslavia. Many times during our debate on a sunny Sunday morning in late Sepember Vienna, the question came up: Who did this? Who were the actors? Languages do not simply come from nowhere. The decision to declare a dialect or a variety a language; the process and act of then naming that language officially; the codification and standardisation of that language through corpus planning; the compilation of dictionaries, grammars, etc.; the changing of the name of a language as a subject in schools, universities, etc.; the decisions of publishers and media companies in this whole process – all of these involve linguists, and consideration of the consequences of these decisions must therefore concern all of us deeply. And this does not simply apply to linguists and academics working in the successor states of the Yugoslav Federation. As pointed out in the debate, what look like arbitrary, harmless decisions by institutions, publishers and other actors in Vienna or Paris or wherever are in fact reflections of the decision to locate, through a linguistic choice, on a particular political constellation. Dubrovko S˘kiljan, from the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Ljubljana, Slovenia, sets the scene for the various papers and debate by musing about the thoughts and words of travellers making their way through the physical borders of south-central Europe, which often contradict the simple dictum that language equals country. Ranko Bugarski, from the University of Belgrade in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, then presents ‘an analysis of the role of language in establishing and modifying ethnic boundaries in relation to political borders, with Yugoslavia and its successor states providing the framework for a case study’. Dona Kolar-Panov, University of Skopje in Macedonia, highlights the role of the media in fixing and maintaining ethnolinguistic boundaries with her study of multicultural broadcasting policy and practice in Macedonia. The debate deals with a variety of issues arising from these three papers: codification and borders; the role of linguists as political actors; language planning and language change in the context of the Yugoslav successor states; language rights and wrongs in situations of ethnolinguistic nationalism; and the role of transnational media in the process of fragmentation. The papers by the main speakers prompted not only a lively debate, but also some responses both from participants on the day and from invited guests who were unable to attend. Tatiana Zhurzhenko draws an analogy between the project of Ukraine and the project of Yugoslavia as two case studies in nation-building. Marija Mitrovic´’s personal experience of growing up in multilingual Vojvodina prompted her to write a response to the papers and to reject the notion of monolingualism as the norm and to plead for a recognition of

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language based on individual rather than collective identity. Finally, Melita Richter Malabotta writes about the discourse and semantics of the war in the former Yugoslavia and about the consequences of conflict for language, in a lexical and semantic sense, with sociolinguistic implications. Note 1. Dittmar 1997: 131ff gives a comprehensive overview.

References Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bakhtin, M. (1934/1981) The Dialogic Imagination. (Michael Holquist ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Balibar, Étienne (1997) La crainte des masses. Politique et philosophie avant et après Marx. Paris: Galilée. Balkan Neighbours Newsletter 2000/10. Between 1994 and 2000 available on the Internet (http://www.access.online.bg/bn/newsletters). Berg, E. and Saima, O. (2000) Writing post-Soviet Estonia on the world map. Political Geography 19(5). (Downloaded from Internetversion, Elsevir Science Ltd.) Bloomfield, L. (1933/1965) Language History. (Harry Hoijer ed.). New York: Holt, Rinehart &Winston. Bourdieu, P. (1982) Ce que parler veut dire. L’économie des échanges linguistiques. Paris: Fayard. Bugarski, R. and Hawkesworth, C. (1992) Language Planning in Yugoslavia. Columbus: Ohio. Busch, B. (2001) Grenzvermessungen: Sprachen und Medien in Zentral-, Südost- und Osteuropa. In: B. Busch. B. Hipfli and K. Robins (eds.) Bewegte Identitäten – Medien in transkulturellen Kontexten (145–173). Klagenfurt: Drava. Busch, B. (1999) Der virtuelle Dorfplatz. Minderheitenmedien, Globalisierung und kulturelle Identität. Klagenfurt: Drava. Chambers, J. and Trudgill, P. (1980) Dialectology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, D. (1997) Demythologizing sociolinguistics. In N. Coupland and A. Jaworski (eds.) Sociolinguistics. A Reader and Coursebook (55–67). New York: St. Martin’s Press. Clyne, M. (1996) Sprache, Sprachbenutzer und Sprachbereich. In H. Goebl, P. Nelde, Z. Stary and W. Wölk (eds.) Kontaktlinguistik. Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung 1. Halbband (pp. 12-22). Berlin: Walther de Gruyter. Dittmar, N. (1997) Grundlagen der Soziolinguistk – Ein Arbeitsbuch mit Aufgaben. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Dragic˘evic-S˘es˘ic´, M. (2001) Borders and maps in contemporary Yugoslav art. In N. S˘vob-Dokic (ed.) Redefining Cultural Identities (p71–87). Zagreb: Institute for International Relations. Edwards, J. (1985) Language, Society and Identity. London: Blackwell & Deutsch. Fishman, J. (1971) Sociolinguistics. A Brief Introduction. Rowley, MA: Newbury. Hall, S. (1995) The question of cultural identity. In S. Hall, D. Held, D. Hubert and K. Thompson (eds.) Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies (595–634). Oxford: Blackwell. Halliday, M.A.K, McIntosh, A. and Strevens, P. (1964) The Linguistic Sciences and Language Taching. London: Longman. Hinrichs, U. (ed.) (1999) Handbuch der Südosteuropalinguistik. Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz. Hodz˘ic´, A. (2000) Preoccupation with the ‘other’ (19–41). In N. Skopljanac Brunner, S. Gredelj, A. Hodz˘ic´ and B. Kris˘tofic´: Media & War. Belgrade: Argument. Husband, C. (2001) Über den Kampf gegen Rassismus hinaus. Entwurf einer polyethnischen Medienlandschaft (9–20). In B. Busch, B. Hipfl and K. Robins (eds.) Bewegte Identitäten. Medien in transkulturellen Kontexten. Klagenfurt: Drava. Jahn, J-E. (1999) New Croatian language planning and its consequences for language attitude and linguistic behavior – the Istrian case. Language & Communication 19 (4), 329–354.

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Labov, W. (1972) Sociolinguistic Patterns. Oxford: Blackwell. Langston, K. and Peti-Stantic, A. (2003) Attitudes towards linguistic purism in Croatia: Evaluating efforts at language reform. In M. Dedaic and D.N. Nelson (eds): At War with Words. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter (in print). Langston, K. (1999) Linguistic cleansing: Language purism in Croatia after the Yugoslav break-up. International Politics 36 (1999), 179–201. Meinhof, U. H. (ed.) (2001) Living (with) Borders. Identity Discourses on East-West Borders in Europe. (Ashgate Border Regions Series) Aldershot: Ashgate. Melis, L. (1996) Frontière linguistiques. In H. Goebl, P. Nelde, Z. Stary and W. Wölk (Hg.) Kontaktlinguistik. Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung 1. Halbband (175–180). Berlin: de Gruyter. Morley, D. and Robins, K. (1996) Spaces of Identity. Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. London and New York: Routledge. Neweklowski, G. (2000) Serbisch, Kroatisch, Bosnisch, Montenegrinisch – Perspektiven. In: L. Zybatov, (ed.) Sprachwandel in der Slavia. Die slavischen Sprachen an der Schwelle zum 21. Jahrhundert ( 543–559). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Newman, D. and Paasi, A. (1998) Fences and neighbours in the postmodern world: Boundary narratives in political geography. Progress in Human Geography 22(2) 186–207. Okuka, M. (1998) Eine Sprache, viele Erben. Sprachenpolitik als Nationalisierungsinstrument in Ex-Jugoslawien. Klagenfurt: Wieser. S˘ipka, M. (1997) Standardni jezik u Bosni i Hercegovini u dokumentima jezi_ke politike. Sarajevo. Manuskript. S˘kiljan, D. (2001) Languages with(out) frontiers. In N. S˘vob-Dokic (ed.) Redefining Cultural Identities ( 87–101). Zagreb: Institute for International relations. Skopljanac Brunner, N., Gredelj, S., Hodz˘ic´, A. and Kristofic, B. (eds) (2000) Media & War. Zagreb: Centre for Transition and Civil Society Research and Belgrade, Agency Argument. Wodak, R., de Cillia, R., Reisigl, M. and K. Liebhart (1999) The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Zybatov, L. (ed.) (2000) Sprachwandel in der Slavia. Die slavischen Sprachen an der Schwelle zum 21. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Chapter 2

A Linguist on the Train to Vienna DUBRAVKO S˘KILJAN, Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Ljubljana, Slovenia It is possible – at least in a linguist’s imagination – that a passenger travelling by train from Zagreb to Vienna is curious about linguistic matters, and especially, perhaps, about the relations between languages and borders. At first sight she or he would perhaps conclude that these relations are very simple ones, and that state frontiers could be identified with linguistic borderlines without any problem. Actually, the railway will pass through three different states, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria, and on every frontier the entire linguistic environment will change: policemen, customs officers and train personnel will use different languages, the appearance of signs on railway stations will be modified, and newspapers sold on the train will be printed in Croatian, Slovenian and German respectively. Our passenger could find this to be quite normal, because Croatia is inhabited by Croats who speak Croatian, while Slovenia is inhabited by Slovenes speaking Slovenian, and Austria by Austrians whose language is… German. In spite of the first traces of doubt caused by this incongruity between the name of the inhabitants of Austria and their language, she or he will probably presume that in principle there is a complete correspondence (or, at least, a close correlation) between the three kinds of border – the border between states, between languages and between nations. However, her or his companion in the same compartment, who is travelling from Belgrade to Munich, for example, will not have a similar linguistic experience: on the Serbo-Croatian frontier the alphabet on the signs is indeed changed, but the language of the officials remains basically the same and, if somebody understands the idiom used on one side of the border, she or he could easily comprehend what is spoken on the other. On the Austrian–German frontier there is no linguistic change at all, so that the statement about the correspondence between state and language borders is not well founded. A third traveller, being a Slovene from Klagenfurt, confirms this assertion and adds the example of her or his compatriots who live in Austria: they speak Slovenian, but it has to be admitted that for some of them, even if they consider themselves Slovenes, their mother tongue is German. Consequently, it is wrong to identify not only linguistic and state borders but also ethnic and linguistic as well as ethnic and state borderlines. In our imaginary compartment, the fourth passenger is coming from London: she or he draws the attention of the others to the fact that all of them, while the train is at the moment standing in Maribor, are speaking English, and that many people in Slovenia, Croatia or Austria are doing the same. As the

13

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passenger from her or his own experience well knows, it is possible to communicate all over the world by speaking English, so the whole discussion about languages and borders seems to be pointless, because the example of English evidently shows that languages do not in fact have borders. Let us, finally, suppose that the fifth person in the compartment is a linguist, who would sincerely like to explain to his or her fellow travellers how linguistic theory perceives the issue of the relationship between languages and borders. Primarily, it should be acknowledged that linguistics does not have a simple answer to the question and that its explanations could notably vary according to the theoretical and epistemological basis of a particular linguistic school or orientation. Nevertheless, almost all linguists would agree that there is no clear and necessary correlation between linguistic and ethnic or between linguistic and state borders. All European states (with the imperfect exceptions of Iceland, Portugal and San Marino) are multilingual, as are a majority of states of the world: in some of them, e.g. in India, China or Papua New Guinea, the population uses dozens of different languages, which, indeed, do not have an equal status in public communication, but every idiom nevertheless presupposes the existence of a group of speakers that consider that language to be their mother tongue. The fact that the number of languages in the world is estimated to be between three and six thousand, while the number of states is about one hundred and fifty, points out the multilingual character of the greater part of contemporary states.1 On the other hand, there are obviously languages that are spoken in more than one state and that surpass state borders: French (in France, Switzerland and Belgium) or German (in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Belgium) provide convincing proof of such situations. Moreover, English is the mother tongue of the majority of Irish, Welsh or Scottish people (in spite of the fact that they regard the respective Celtic idioms as their national languages), and still more recently SerboCroatian (the issue of which would merit being examined in more detail) has been considered to be one language used by two, three or even four different nations. Consequently, linguistic borders should be studied – at first approach – as an independent entity possessing its own particular features and its own definition. Nevertheless, the term linguistic border (if it is actually a linguistic term) is not unambiguous at all and it could denote at least two distinct phenomena: it indicates the borderline between two (or more) idioms (i.e., abstract linguistic systems) or between two (or more) linguistic communities (i.e., concrete human groups sharing the same idiom as their communicative and expressive medium). The very notion of a border between two linguistic systems is far from being clear: we are dealing here with the problem of linguistic diversity and its limits. From the standpoint of orthodox, i.e. Saussurian structuralism, each linguistic system is defined by means of its structure, which consists of a network of relations between the elements of the system: if any one systemic element changes its position in the system, or disappears, or occurs as a new element, the whole network is transformed, and then we have a distinct, newly formed system. Consequently, as every speaker is endowed with linguistic competence that presupposes at least one element

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more or less, or arranged differently to the same elements in the networks determining the linguistic systems of other speakers, the diversity of systems has to be, in the final analysis, described as a diversity of idiolects. Moreover, languages vary over time under the influence of their use, so that, ultimately, linguistic diversity, observed from a structural perspective, represents an endless process in which there are no real borderlines between two points. Obviously, the use of languages, human linguistic praxis, does not fully conform to this structural view: speakers experience their language as a collective phenomenon, shared with other speakers and suitable for establishing collective relations. In spite of the differences (and often even by neglecting them), they consider language to be one of the basic instruments of group identification, by means of which it is possible to distinguish our sense of belonging to a community from others. If (structural as well as non-structural) linguistics wants to describe this collective character of human idioms on a systemic level, it should also neglect some differences in the endless continuum and establish in a certain way limitations to the linguistic diversity. Linguistic theory recognises at least three restrictions pertaining to the infinite variety of linguistic systems (cf. Katic˘ic´, 1970: 4ff.), one of them, being typological concerns systemic relations and elements only, whilst two others relate to the genetic kinship among idioms (i.e., their common origin) and to the contacts that result in mutual borrowings of particular systemic units. For our purposes the most interesting are the typological restrictions of linguistic diversity, which are, however, often the result of genetic kinship or contacts between idioms. Thus the introduction of typological restrictions results in the establishment of identical structural elements among different idioms: if all their elements are identical,2 two idioms are representations of the same system. This proceeding produces the transformation of the infinite diversity of idioms to a group consisting of a finite number of elements. It has to be emphasized that this operation concerns only Saussurian langue and not parole, abstract systems and not their concrete realizations. If we have a finite number of idioms, they ought to be delimited one from the other, so that the result of such an operation is the establishment of systemic borders between these idioms too. But, as this operation consists of searching for differences and similarities among systems, we should suppose that two different systems could be more or less different one from the other, the yardstick being the number of identical or non-identical elements. Consequently, all borders between systems do not have the same ‘solidity’: we can distinguish very ‘hard’ borders between systems, which are almost entirely different from each other, from very ‘soft’ borders between two systems sharing many common elements. The whole range between these two extremes is occupied by theoretically countless intermediate possibilities. As we are dealing with abstract linguistic systems, in our model, in principle, any two idioms could be compared, regardless either of their sociolinguistic status or of their temporal or spatial determinants. Thus, for example, it could be said that that there exists a ‘hard’ systemic border (according to common, morphologically based, linguistic typology) between German and Classical Chinese, while the borderline between Russian and Slovenian is much ‘softer’.The model is applicable, of course, not only to languages actually coexisting in space but to those adjacent in time too: the borders between

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Basque and Spanish (in space) or between Gaulish and Latin (in time) represent ‘hard’ borders, whilst the frontiers between German and Dutch (in space) or between Old Church Slavonic and Macedonian (in time) are obviously ‘soft’ ones. Although it seems, at first sight, that the borderlines between various idiolects, dialects and sociolects inside one language should be necessarily ‘softer’ than the borders between two different languages, the establishment of boundaries between languages does not depend entirely and systematically on the degree of ‘hardness’ or ‘softness’ of their reciprocal differences. There are, indeed, languages divided by very ‘soft’ borderlines, as in the case of Scandinavian languages, for example, just as there are dialects with ‘harder’ internal borders, as in the case of C˘akavian and certain S˘tokavian patois of Serbo-Croatian. Moreover, historical linguistics and dialectology demonstrate that in time as well as in space there exist continua in which there are no real interruptions between systems, and the boundaries are more a product of some kind of convention than the result of clear systemic differences: this assertion can be exemplified by the temporal continuum from Proto-Germanic, through Old and Middle High Germanic, to modern German, or by the spatial continuum that represents Romance languages from Portugal to Belgium and Italy. That means that our perception of languages and their relations to dialects does not depend (or – at least – does not depend exclusively) on the degree of ‘hardness’ or ‘softness’ of linguistic borders. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the other signification of the notion of a linguistic boundary, i.e., the case when it denotes the borderline between two linguistic communities. As has been said, a linguistic community is defined as a group that shares the same idiom. This general definition allows all speakers of an idiom to be considered as members of its linguistic community, regardless of whether the idiom is their mother tongue or a language that was learned later. It is useful to introduce the distinction between a primary linguistic community, consisting of speakers for whom the idiom is their mother tongue, and a secondary community, which consists of speakers who acquired it later (cf. S˘kiljan, 2000). The distinction is especially functional if we accept the statement that the collective relations established by means of language are realised in two mutually connected dimensions, communicative and symbolic (cf. Edwards, 1985: 17ff.). The communicative aspect ensures the possibility of reciprocal understanding and the exchange of messages and information, whilst in a symbolic dimension language is a very important instrument of collective identification and, therefore, of individual identity too. The symbolic aspect of language is almost always present in primary communities, and in secondary communities it could be more or less weakened. In an ideal projection, these two dimensions should be in perfect harmony, and there should be a complete correspondence between the communicative and the symbolic space of a language. In real practice such harmony, even when it is a matter of mother tongues, could never be attained, and two spaces are often disproportionately distributed: sometimes – especially in the case of mother tongues, as the example of Irish clearly shows – it is the symbolic value that predominates, and sometimes the communicative space is much larger, e.g. the communicative space of English in its secondary linguistic community.

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Consequently, even if only primary communities are observed, it is difficult to determine their real and concrete boundaries because of the incomplete correspondence between communicative and symbolic space, because of the fact that on the ‘margins’ of the community there are always speakers with two or more mother tongues and, finally, because of the dynamic character of every human group, including linguistic communities, in which the structures are actually in constant change. But the fundamental problem arises from the very definition of a linguistic community: if it is defined as an idiom spoken (or symbolically accepted) by a given collective, we need to have a clear and distinct definition of the idiom in order to render the frontiers of community precisely. We have already seen that linguistics has not been able to devise such a definition of language that would enable an univocal determination of its community. Nevertheless, linguistic communities do really exist and they belong to some kind of ‘core’ human group, where individuals satisfy their needs for social contacts and – therefore – realise an essential part of their individual and collective identities. If the collective identity is – according to modern interpretations – defined more by its borders and relations to other groups than by its inherent characteristics,3 linguistic communities ought to have specific borders, which are distinctive features between Us, as speakers of Our Idiom, and Others, who speak differently. Built inside these communities we have the linguistic identity of speakers, whose quality depends, at least partially, on the character of systemic frontiers of the idiom in relation to other, ‘neighbouring’ linguistic systems. If an idiom is separated from surrounding idioms by ‘hard’ systemic borders, its speakers will establish, with high probability, a strong collective linguistic identity by means of their communicative practice. In sociolinguistic literature this sort of identity is usually connected to Abstand languages, i.e., to the linguistic systems that are, by their systemic particularities, distant enough to be clearly distinguished from neighbouring systems in the perception of its own speakers as well as in the perception of members of other communities: Hungarian or Basque linguistic communities in Europe possess such a strong identity, their languages being paradigmatic examples of Abstand idioms. On the other hand, if the borderlines among idioms are ‘soft’, as they are in the case of continua as we mentioned, the linguistic identity originating from communicative practice only would be expectedly ‘weak’, so that it should be strengthened by other means: these processes are described in sociolinguistics as Ausbau processes and result ordinarily from language policy.4 Obviously, both linguistic borders, either those between linguistic systems or those between linguistic communities, are not intrinsically connected to territory, as they are not – as was mentioned already – necessarily related to ethnic or national groups. Linguistic frontiers that divide languages and other idioms actually appertain to the abstract level of the linguistic model and could (but should not) be only realised in space, and the borderlines among different communities are changeable in space to the extent to which members of such communities are mobile: in the modern world it is quite possible for an individual, whose mother tongue is, for example, Albanian, to be situated in Albania as well as in the United States or Haiti or anywhere else, ‘carrying’ in

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such way the borders of the Albanian linguistic community with her or himself. However, our everyday linguistic experience provides us with evidence that there is a connection between linguistic systems or their communities and territory, and that systemic as well as collective frontiers are the ones most frequently projected upon a real geopolitical space. This experience could be confirmed by linguistics itself: in dialectology and in linguistic geography, the usual way to portray borders between linguistic systems or communities is by using maps, on which languages (or their respective communities) are represented as entities occupying a coherent and clearly delimited space. The very nature of that projection of linguistic borders upon real territory and the historical and social circumstances of the phenomenon should attract the attention of linguists, since the connection between language and soil was evidently an important step in establishing the linguistic identity of modern mankind. Only as ancient sources testify, in Antiquity were languages primarily related to linguistic communities and not to a particular territory, not only in political and social organisations with undefined and vague frontiers, as was, for example, the Scythian state, but also in well organised states, such as the Persian Empire or the Greek poleis (cf. S˘kiljan, 2001). We have to note that state frontiers in Antiquity (as well as in the Middle Ages) were, of course, much more indefinite phenomena than they are today, that the language of state administration never obliged the population to constitute territorial linguistic communities, and that the territories of great states always consisted of several linguistic communities, the languages of which were related to their speakers and not to the soil. Even at the beginning of the Modern Age, linguistic communities and their territories were not defined by state borders, and perhaps the most influential community, the community comprising the speakers of Latin, had no territory at all. Consequently, we can suppose that the connection between language and territory was actually established at the moment when nation states were constituted: they used both aspects of language, communicative and symbolic, to construct new economic and political structures and a new perception of a collective ethnic identity. There is no need to stress the truism that the bourgeoisie that arose needed to create effective instruments of communication on newly constituted common national markets, so that the beginning of the process of linguistic standardisation, which resulted from explicit language policy, is closely related to the formation of nation states. On the other hand, viewed symbolically, newly formed nations could not find a more appropriate symbol than language: it possessed what they were lacking – an apparently ‘natural’ character (being inseparably associated with the human race) and history and tradition (that not only characterise language but are also mainly mediated by means of linguistic messages). All that was left to do was to ‘assign’ language to the territory and to give to it and its community territorial boundaries, corresponding to – if possible – the borders of the nation-state.5 The assertion that the symbolic relation between language and territory (including the drawing of linguistic borderlines) was established at the time of the formation of national ideologies and nation states can be confirmed by many different arguments: we shall quote only one, which provides evidence of the linguistic aspects of the problem. The argument is provided by the fact

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that certain languages ‘possess’ a territory, even though they no longer have a relevant linguistic community, as well as by the existence of linguistic communities without territories. Breton languages without a linguistic community that actually occupies the assigned territory (the case could be illustrated by Irish or – to a certain extent – Welsh) are symbols of nations that have actively participated in the processes of national constitution and which have taken over this symbol from their linguistic community. If a language in these processes became the symbol of a nation, it also symbolically acquired the national soil: once a language has taken on this role, the relation between it and territory continues to function, regardless to the fact that it could be (as in the case of Irish) substituted by another language, or even if the nation state has not been constituted (as in the case of Breton or Welsh). Consequently, the emphasis is on the participation in national movements in the 18th or the 19th centuries. On the other hand, languages without territory represented on contemporary linguistic maps appertain to those linguistic communities and ethnic groups that did not participate in national movements: the example of Romanies or Ruthenians show that they remained without symbolic territory even in cases where they traditionally settled certain areas, because they missed the opportunity of relating their language to soil at the ‘right’ moment. Similar proof is offered by the existence of symbolic territories that no longer have an appropriate linguistic community or language: the case could be exemplified by the present position of the German language in Slovenia where German linguistic communities do not exist after World War II, but there are serious (politically motivated) claims for attributing the territory to these nonexistent linguistic minorities, whilst the speakers of Serbian and Croatian in Slovenia, for example, are not allowed to make such a request, in spite of the fact that they represent nearly 10% of the Slovenian population. The legal explanation is that the German minority is to be regarded as autochthonous and the other as non-autochthonous, as the speakers of Serbian or Croatian were not present in Slovenia at the moment of national constitution; and this presence provides the real meaning of the term ‘autochthonous linguistic community’. The conclusion is that the symbolic transfer of language from a linguistic community to a territory took place together with the processes of the formation of nation states and the constitution of national awareness in the Modern Age. Therefore, only those ethnic entities that have actively taken part in the process of the distribution of national territories (which have not necessarily resulted in state formation) could clearly delimit their linguistic soil and fix their linguistic borders. Consequently, the establishment of these borderlines was in the first place an ideologically initiated political act: it could not – at least in principle – neglect ‘hard’ systemic frontiers between two languages (but, to compensate for this, it was, without difficulty, supported by an existing ‘strong’ identity of the linguistic community). On the other hand, it could model, by means of language policy, ‘soft’ systemic frontiers, according to ideological and political purposes, trying to convert the appropriate ‘weak’ linguistic identity into a ‘strong’ one and to fix new borders, which had to be represented as if they had existed long ago.

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The linguist’s explanation of linguistic borders – complicated, boring and unclear as it is – would probably not reach its conclusion before the train arrived in Vienna and surely would not satisfy the people in the compartment: we can only hope that there was a sixth traveller on the remaining seat who knew a better and more interesting story… Notes 1. The uncertainty about the number of languages in the world will be explained a little bit later. 2. Such an identification is always the product of a series of ‘oversights’ of existing differences: usually, linguistics takes into account phonological and morphological units only, neglecting (at least partly) syntax and semantics or lexical elements; the choice of systemic levels and the degree of the abstraction of differences depend essentially upon the theoretical basis of typological classification, which is outside the scope of the present text; cf., however, Whaley (1997) and Nichols (1992). 3. Cf., e.g., Preston 1997, as well as Gumperz (1982). 4. For Ausbau and Abstand languages and processes, cf. Kloss (1967). 5. Apart from classical literature concerning the birth of nation states (Anderson, 1983, Gellner, 1983, Hobsbawm, 1990) cf. also more recent works: James (1996) or Thiesse (1999), and for more linguistically oriented works, see Baggioni (1997), Siguan (1996).

References Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Baggioni, D. (1997) Langues et nations en Europe. Paris: Payot. Edwards, J. (1985) Language, Society and Identity. London: Blackwell & Deutsch. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. London: Blackwell. Gumperz J. (1982) (ed.) Language and Social Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1990) Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, P. (1996) Nation Formation. Towards a Theory of Abstract Community. London: Sage. Katic˘ic´, R. (1970) A Contribution to the General Theory of Comparative Linguistics. The Hague and Paris: Mouton. Kloss, H. (1967) ‘Abstand’ languages and ‘Ausbau’ languages. Anthropological Linguistics 4 (7) 29–41. Nichols, J. (1992) Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Preston, P.W. (1997) Political/Cultural Identity. London: Sage. Siguan, M. (1996) L’Europe des langues. Sprimont: Madraga. S˘kiljan, D. (2000) Language policy between linguistic minorities and majorities. Actas del V Congreso ‘Cultura europea’, 281–288. S˘kiljan, D. (2001) On Herodotus’ Track, Notes about language and identity. Culturelink, Joint Publications Series 3, 85–96. Thiesse, A.-M. (1999) La création des identités nationales. Paris: Seuil. Whaley, L.J. (1997) Introduction to Typology, The Unity and Diversity of Language. Thousand Oaks, London and New Delhi: Sage.

Chapter 3

Language and Boundaries in the Yugoslav Context RANKO BUGARSKI University of Belgrade, FR Yugoslavia

Introduction: Ethnicity and Nationalism Both ethnicity and nationalism are notoriously difficult concepts, not easy to describe and still harder to define, which have especially in recent decades become the subject of a vast body of literature in several academic disciplines. Broadly speaking, we shall follow the prevailing modern view of ethnicity – that is, not as a set of objectively given, primordial and immutable features constituting the essence of an ethnic group, but rather as a complex of socially constructed, contextually and interactionally determined and changeable elements delimiting a human collectivity from others. Some of these are objective (e.g. language, religion, customs, possibly territory) while others are subjective (e.g. belief in common descent, shared memories, symbols and values). Taken individually, they may vary in importance or even be absent; what matters is their interplay, which establishes and preserves a strong feeling of solidarity within the group and marks its distinction from other comparable groups. Ethnicity is thus a process of interchange and adaptation, a construct emerging from variable social relationships, something created and recreated rather than inherent. For our present purpose, nationalism can be regarded as a political ideology – indeed, often a state of mind – based upon a set of premises such as the following. Mankind breaks up naturally into nations. Our own nation is superior to other nations and hence may legitimately make territorial, economic and spiritual claims in relation to less worthy ones. A nation should by rights possess its own state. Nationality is the single most important defining characteristic of individuals, who must therefore demonstrate supreme loyalty to their nation state and be ready to lay down their lives at its altar. Likewise, highly sensitive to historical and social contexts, nationalism may act as a positive agent in nation-building and state construction. Nevertheless, in many parts of the world, including in particular that which is our concern here, it has more often tended to show its aggressive and destructive side, identifying enemies and starting wars. While it may mingle with patriotism, Janus-like nationalism more typically faces the other way, shading off into chauvinism, xenophobia and even racism. Nationalism may be seen as an extension of ethnicity. The essence of both is the drawing and maintenance of boundaries delimiting one collectivity from others – Us from Them, insiders from outsiders, natives from strangers. It is these boundaries that are vital, since they alone guarantee identity and distinc-

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tiveness. In order to know who We are, we must know who They are; the Self can only be defined with reference to the Other. From this point of view the difference between ethnicity and nationalism is basically one of degree rather than kind, in that the latter explicates and brings to full consciousness the solidarity underlying both phenomena. Hence nationalism is activated and ideologised ethnicity, oriented towards perceived nation-serving goals. Just as an ethnic group has the potential for developing into a nation, so ethnicity grows into nationalism in the process of turning ethnic boundaries into national ones, when ethnic identity is submerged into the modern nation, especially the nation state. Put differently, if the nation is envisaged as a kind of extended, nationally conscious and politically structured ethnic group, then nationalism presents itself (in one popular phrasing) as organised ethnocultural solidarity. From this it would follow that nationalism feeds on ethnicity as raw material to be ordered and directed, but also that ethnicity finds its ultimate expression in nationalism.

Language and Ethnonational Boundaries As can be seen from the above discussion, much of the lively current research in ethnicity and nationalism revolves round the central concept of boundaries defining and safeguarding the collective identities of human groups. This focus has been established in the various social sciences, particularly since the appearance of the seminal and highly influential work of the Norwegian social anthropologist Fredrik Barth (1969). His well-known main thesis was that it is these boundaries, rather than the cultural content they enclose, that make an ethnic group and ensure its continued existence over time. They may be solid or porous, get strengthened or weakened, or shift in one direction or another – yet they must persist in some form, for without them ethnic groups could not be differentiated from each other. In that sense, ethnic boundaries are the very foundation of ethnicity. This does not mean, however, that the internal content is dispensable as a whole, for in that case no purpose would be served by drawing boundary lines in the first place. It means only that the individual elements common to both ethnicity and nationalism, being variable and replaceable, cannot in themselves guarantee the preservation of a group’s identity. The only thing that matters is the interplay of the objective and subjective components listed above, which alone preserves the vital sense of in-group solidarity. As one analyst has put it, ‘the continuing power of ethnicity and nationalism resides exactly in that intangible bond which, by definition, can survive the loss of visible markers of group distinctiveness’ (Edwards, 1985: 16). This finally brings us to language, our main concern in the analysis to follow. Does it enjoy a special, privileged place among the elements of ethnicity, as has been assumed – indeed, mostly taken for granted – ever since the inception of modern nationalism some two centuries ago? The bulk of contemporary theory seems to answer this question with a qualified No. (For a review and references, see e.g. Eriksen, 1993.) That is, while language has in reality very often served as an obvious and highly visible mark of ethnic identity as well as nationality, this is by no means obligatory. A group’s language may undergo shift and be replaced by another; many collectivities around the

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world are bilingual or multilingual – yet this need not involve a substantial change, let alone the loss, of the original ethnicity. Despite conventional nationalist claims to the contrary, this fact has been well documented. And in any case linguistic and ethnonational boundaries have rarely coincided throughout recent history, although numerous attempts are on record to make them do so by military action. In what follows, this last point will be elaborated and illustrated from the experience of Yugoslavia, taking into account both the underlying dialect continuum and the officially recognised languages superimposed on it. Here we must start with the general observation that the political borders of states existing on South Slavic linguistic territory do not correspond significantly to the main dialectal divisions, which in turn overlap only partly with the ethnic boundaries of the various groups speaking these dialects. This situation has had certain consequences for the foundation and destiny of some of these states. In order to understand these developments, an overview of the relevant dialectological and historical backgrounds is necessary.1

A Bit of Dialectology The South Slavic dialect area is generally regarded as one of the most complex and interesting in Europe. As a noted dialectologist of the region defined it recently, Starting with northwestern Slovenian dialects in the Julian Alps, the continuum works its way gradually down to southern Aegean Macedonian dialects at the Gulf of Thessaloniki, and to eastern Bulgarian dialects along the shores of the Black Sea. (Alexander, 2000: 4)2 The number of languages into which this continuum is officially segmented has been subject to change, however. Up until World War II there were three: Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian. Since 1944, when Macedonia was set up as a Yugoslav Republic and Macedonian was proclaimed as its literary language, the Macedonian dialects – which had mostly been claimed for Serbian by Serbian linguists and for Bulgarian by Bulgarian scholars – have been subsumed under this new linguistic standard, which raised the number to four. And after the recent break-up of Yugoslavia, as a result of which SerboCroatian was administratively dissolved into Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian, the total went up to six (with a potential seventh, Montenegrin, lurking in the background). Let us first refer very briefly to the three geographically peripheral languages, which are also relatively marginal to our main topic. Slovenian, with an ethnically homogenous body of speakers and a separate history of standardisation, faced no particular problems of delimitation from SerboCroatian. (Its major role in preserving Slovene identity while surrounded on other sides by the much larger populations speaking Italian, German and Hungarian is another matter, beyond the scope of the present discussion.) But at the other end there were indeed such problems, as already implied, with regard to Macedonian and Bulgarian. Although there is no clear dividing line between these two on the level of dialect, the Macedonian literary standard was delimited from Bulgarian in a typical ‘Ausbau’ move, by being based on

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western Macedonian dialects – those furthest from Bulgaria. As is well known, the identity of Macedonians and of their language has been disputed by some of their neighbours, but on political rather than linguistic or even sociolinguistic grounds. It may be expected that such disputes will subside as the young Macedonian state matures and gains confidence, even though the current upheavals regarding the relationship between Macedonian and Albanian within it look rather ominous, with language erecting, or rather supporting, a wall right through its territory. (The dimensions and implications of this problem are convincingly presented in D. Kolar-Panov’s contribution to this volume.) The remainder of this section will be devoted to the central and by far most complex segment of the continuum. The area of Serbo-Croatian extends from the Slovenian-Croatian frontier in the north-west to the Serbian-Macedonian and Serbian-Bulgarian borders in the south-east, exhibiting great dialectal diversity. Without going into details not pertinent to our purpose, and concentrating on the barest essentials, we must call attention to the two major traditional dialect divisions. The first is into three macrodialects, named after the pronoun meaning ´what´: S˘tokavian (s˘to), Kajkavian (kaj) and C˘akavian (c˘a). Cutting across this split, but mostly on S˘tokavian ground, is one based on the reflex of a Proto-Slavic vowel called jat. In some dialects this gave e (Ekavian, e.g. dete ´child´); in others, ije (Ijekavian, e.g. dijete); and in yet others, i (Ikavian, e.g. dite). These two intersecting threefold divisions yielded several combinations, of unequal significance in terms of ethnic distribution, cultural background, literary tradition and standard-language foundation. Kajkavian and C˘akavian are restricted to Croats (though the former shares some features with Slovenian). Both had previously been media of vernacular literary works, but neither of them participated in the formation of standard Serbo-Croatian. This language, built up from an exclusively S˘tokavian (more precisely, Neos˘tokavian) base, appeared in an Ekavian and an Ijekavian (but not Ikavian) version. In ethnic terms it was common to Serbs (largely Ekavian but also Ijekavian) and Croats (Ijekavian only); in addition, it came to be the standard idiom of nations recognised later as Montenegrins and Moslems (both Ijekavian). On top of all this came differences of alphabet, reflecting religious cleavages. As Roman Catholics, Croats have mostly used the Latin script; the Greek Orthodox Serbs traditionally identified with the Cyrillic but have since the early decades of the 20th century increasingly employed the Latin too; Montenegrins, ethnically a branch of the Serbs, likewise; and Muslims, being of Islamic faith, in former centuries used a local version of Arabic writing but in modern times adopted Latin and to a lesser extent Cyrillic. In order to gain a perspective on this considerable mixture and to make some sense of more recent developments, we shall now take a look at the historical dimension of the relations between language, ethnicity and nationality in the region under discussion.

A Chunk of History The following sketch of the unusual life story of Serbo-Croatian will be organised around what are arguably the basic conflicting forces determining

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its destiny: attempts at unification alternating with separatist reactions to them. Closely related ethnically and linguistically, Serbs and Croats shared some of the vernaculars, but each had several different literary languages as part of their native traditions. The early decades of the 19th century gradually brought about a realisation that their cultural kinship within the Slavic world should be given a clear expression despite the fact that they lived in different empires. The notion of a common literary language emerged as the principal symbol of these sentiments, fully in harmony with the spirit of the times. On the Serbian side, Vuk Karadz˘ic´ reformed the orthography and laid the foundations for a literary standard based on the vernacular speech of peasant folk – specifically, on the Neos˘tokavian Ijekavian dialects, geographically central, in part common to Serbs and Croats, and the vehicle of a notable oral literary tradition. True, Vuk himself, under the influence of the prevailing Romantic identification of languages with peoples, and dimly aware of the three major dialect groups, had broadly assigned C˘akavian to Croats, Kajkavian to Slovenes and S˘tokavian to Serbs. This symmetrical distribution, which made all S˘tokavian speakers (Orthodox, Catholic and Mohammedan) appear as Serbs, was apparently of no great concern to Vuk, who spoke for ethnolinguistic unity in any case. However, it exposed him to persistent charges of Great Serbian ideology. On the Croatian side this was the time of the Illyrian movement, inspired by Pan-Slavic visions and led by Ljudevit Gaj, which was psychologically akin to Vuk’s programme. So the two parties converged in a joint meeting of philologists and men of letters at Vienna in 1850, which produced a manifesto (known as the Vienna Agreement) stating that they were all of the same kin and should, among other things, share a common literary standard. With this goal in mind, the Croats decided to abandon their Kajkavian and C˘akavian literary idioms in favour of the new standard language proposed and in part elaborated by Vuk. This decision was made easier by the fact that Croatian S˘tokavian vernacular speakers naturally used the Ijekavian pronunciation codified by Vuk after his own dialect. By the turn of the century Croatian ‘Vukovites’, the most influential philological school there at the time, produced the first normative grammars and dictionaries of the ‘Croatian or Serbian’ language, which marked the birth of a common Serbo-Croatian standard language. However, this language turned out to be common more in spirit than to the letter: combining two fairly distinct historical and cultural traditions, it was never truly unified in all respects – nor could it have been. Although in essence a single system structurally, it still displayed non-negligible differences in script and orthography, in points of pronunciation and grammar, and especially in lexicon. One significant difference, which caused discomfort in some quarters, emerged with the early departure of the main body of the Serbs from Vuk’s Ijekavian norm and the adoption, as a preferential standard, of the Ekavian pronunciation far more common in Serbia proper and in Vojvodina. Another, as already noted, had to do with script. These two dualities, of Ekavian vs. Ijekavian pronunciation and of Cyrillic vs. Latin alphabet, were from the very start and have remained to this day the most visible features of disunity within Serbo-Croatian, and as such a constant source of dissatisfaction among the more ardent seekers after unity – linguistic, cultural, national or political.

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We shall have occasion later on to see in somewhat greater detail what kind of effects this state of affairs has had under the changing circumstances. At this point in our chronicle, however, we may draw attention to a characteristic instance of well-meaning but hopelessly unrealistic attempts to remove both dualities with one blow. In 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I, the influential Serbian literary critic Jovan Skerlic´ circulated a letter among a number of Serbian and Croatian intellectuals, prompting their reactions to the idea that the standard language should be unified. The gist of the proposal was that in public use Serbs should give up the Cyrillic script in favour of the Latin, while Croats in their turn should adopt the Ekavian pronunciation instead of the Ijekavian. In this way Serbo-Croatian would truly be a single language, rid of complicating dichotomies. The response varied, as one might expect, and with the Great War at the doorstep the initiative was in any case quickly forgotten. Yet the episode stands out, and is still occasionally recalled, as a testimony to the persistent belief in the capacity of individuals to direct the flow of language even under unfavourable political conditions. (By this time Serbia was an independent kingdom, but Croatia was still under Habsburg rule.) However, the drive for uniformity was destined to appear on a much grander scale at the end of the war, with the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918, to be renamed in 1929 as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Seen by the intellectual and political elites in all three peoples as the realisation of the time-honoured dream of South Slavic unity within a state of their own (though excluding the Bulgarians, who had followed a different course), this was conceived as a strictly unitary state. The driving force behind it may legitimately be described as Yugoslav nationalism. Ethnic and linguistic borders appeared to crumble under the blast of patriotic rhetoric about one folk composed of three tribes, one and the same nation bearing three names and, appropriately, speaking a single language. Present-day observers might find this hard to believe, but in both of the Monarchy’s Constitutions (of 1921 and 1931) there was an article stating that the official language of the Kingdom was ‘Serbo-Croato-Slovenian’ (srpskohrvatsko-slovena_ki). The plain fact that such a language never actually existed evidently did not bother the ideologues of ‘integral Yugoslavism’. One must add, in fairness, however, that this triple linguonym rarely occurred outside official documents. Traditional names (Serbian, Croatian, Serbo-Croatian, Croatian or Serbian, Slovenian) freely appeared in public use, and possible embarrassment was frequently avoided by referring to ‘our language’. (Incidentally, this was also the title chosen for the principal professional journal of language cultivation, Nas˘ jezik, launched in 1932 by the Linguistic Society of Belgrade under the editorship of the leading Serbian linguist, Aleksandar Belic´. The journal has continued publication to this day, bearing the same cautiously neutral title.) But whatever name was employed, Serbian usage was undoubtedly favoured and mostly set up as the real model for others to follow. This pressure caused hostile reactions among the Croatian intelligentsia, increasingly unwilling to play second fiddle in the common Kingdom and showing clear signs of secessionism – not only linguistic but political as well. The Kingdom’s

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last years were marked by several Zagreb publications stressing the differences between the Croatian and Serbian languages, in step with efforts at administrative separation. Internal struggles took their toll, and when the Axis powers attacked in April 1941 the Monarchy proved unable to put up a serious resistance. Along with it, the ‘Serbo-Croato-Slovenian’ language became part of history, never to be heard of since. In sharp contrast to the inter-war period, when both ethnic and linguistic boundaries were played down – albeit often artificially – as a matter of official policy of the unitary state of Yugoslavia, World War II brought about their reinforcement. This was not particularly evident in Serbia under German occupation, though the language was once again called Serbian; there was simply no motivation to do anything about it. But in the so-called Independent State of Croatia, with its fascist puppet government, such dividing lines were deliberately made into walls. Being a Croat or a Serb there could literally make the difference between life and death, and the Croatian language was institutionally fashioned to be as different from Serbian as possible – actually even more so, given the frequently artificial measures introduced. These interventions included emphasising the etymological over the Vukovian phonological principle in orthography, reviving forgotten Croatian archaisms, and the invention of ‘native’ words to replace those of international currency. All this intense activity, short-lived like the state itself, may be seen as the somewhat grotesque peak of trends towards linguistic separation, visible but reasonably controlled in the preceding Monarchy. In a weakened form some of these were to spill over into yet another state formation on the territory of the ‘first’ Yugoslavia, built on the rubble of the Third Reich and its allies. This, of course, was the ‘second’ Yugoslavia, constructed as a federation of ‘popular’ (later ‘socialist’) republics under Communist rule, headed by Marshal Tito. These republics were inhabited by ‘peoples’ or ‘nations’ (Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, subsequently also Montenegrins and Muslims), all of which were granted equal rights. Correspondingly, their languages were proclaimed as equal in official use, so there was no longer a state language – despite the practical preponderance of Serbo-Croatian (now once again regarded as essentially a single language, shared by four of the six recognised national populations). Languages of the ‘nationalities’ (i.e. national minorities) also enjoyed institutional protection, and the two largest of these, Albanian and Hungarian, were even represented in proceedings at the federal level. Such an arrangement, where members of different nations could live peacefully side by side and use their languages freely, gradually made for a new, this time largely spontaneous and hence genuine, softening of boundaries. A living testimony to this development was the large number of ethnically mixed marriages and of individuals claiming Yugoslav nationality as well as citizenship (these two being sharply distinct in this part of the world, unlike prevailing Western practice). The 1981 population census, the last to be taken before the federation’s subsequent disintegration, recorded no fewer than 1,219,000 nationally declared Yugoslavs (up from 273,000 in 1971!) – a category close in size to, or even exceeding, some of the officially recognised ethnic nations (Bugarski, 1992: 15).

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But let us concentrate on Serbo-Croatian. Whereas in the first post-war decade it continued to wear its distinct wartime labels (Serbian in Serbia, Croatian in Croatia), there was a growing feeling that in the new community of friendly nations it should really once more be instituted as a single language common to several of these and hence a welcome bond among them. This orientation resulted in a meeting of the leading Serbian and Croatian linguists and writers at Novi Sad in 1954, a kind of sequel to the Vienna gathering a hundred years before. In like spirit, the Novi Sad Agreement reaffirmed the basic unity of the language, henceforth to be officially designated as SerboCroatian in Serbia and Montenegro, Croato-Serbian (or Croatian or Serbian) in Croatia, and Serbo-Croatian/Croato-Serbian in Bosnia-Herzegovina. A call was issued for the unification of the terminologies of the various fields and the production of a common orthography and a modern multivolume dictionary. The results were rather meagre, however. Practically nothing was done about terminology. The orthography was published simultaneously in Novi Sad (Cyrillic edition) and Zagreb (Latin edition), but the latter was soon quietly departed from and after a while replaced with new Croatian ones. But the really dramatic break involved the dictionary. Whereas the Novi Sad Cyrillic version was duly published in the projected six volumes, the Zagreb Latin version discontinued publication after the first two volumes, in response to severe criticism by Croatian linguists for its alleged strong Serbian bias under the guise of the Latin script. This was only one demonstration of the widespread feeling among Croatian intellectuals that the proclaimed linguistic equality did not exist in reality, the Serbian variety of the common language being once again imposed, not only in Croatia but also at the federal level of government. In order to understand this situation it is necessary to know that by this time, that is the late 1960s, it was accepted by most linguists on both sides that the language had two main variants (varijante) defined in ethnoterritorial terms: the Serbian (or Eastern) and the Croatian (or Western). Perhaps inevitably, these showed a tendency to develop into distinct standard languages, given the right political conditions. As early as 1967 the leading Croatian cultural institutions issued a ‘Declaration on the name and position of the Croatian literary language’, calling for the official recognition of Croatian as a separate language rather than a variant of Croato-Serbian. This caused a reaction on the Serbian side, where a group of writers published a statement to the effect that, since the Croats had relinquished linguistic unity, the Serbs must accept this act of legitimate will, which meant that the Novi Sad Agreement was no longer valid. Both these documents were renounced by the respective political nomenclatures, and the Croatian move was temporarily suspended under the authority of President Tito. Yet the drive continued: the early 1970s saw a strong nationalist movement known as the ‘Croatian Spring’, and the federal Constitution of 1974 introduced significant confederational elements into Yugoslavia’s political structure. By this time the ‘Croatian literary language’ had received administrative acknowledgement, and normative steps were duly taken to ensure its separate standardisation. Such activities had no counterpart in Serbia, where inclinations towards Serbo-Croatian persisted, partly

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motivated by a concern for the sizeable Serb ethnic populations residing in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. As a result, language policy in Croatia had a clear, single goal, to institutionalise a separate Croatian language, whereas many Serbian linguists had devoted much of their time and effort to the description of Serbian dialects outside Serbia. (On the political implications of dialect study in this region, see Greenberg, 1996.) This state of affairs, marked by an imbalance of resolute Croatian linguistic – and, indeed, political – secessionism and the indecisive, half-hearted, unitarist orientation predominant in Serbia, lasted for another dozen years or so. But when the long-prepared disintegration of the federation actually occurred in 1991–92, language was more clearly seen to have paved the way for such an outcome. Moreover, it came to be manipulated by all the warring parties in an attempt to retain or conquer territories, purify them ethnically, and enclose them within linguistic walls. The next section of our account deals with the war years and their aftermath.

Boundaries into Borders The role of language in preparing the ground for armed conflicts and its abuse in political and war propaganda has been described elsewhere (see Bugarski, 2000a, 2001, with references to earlier work).3 On the present occasion we shall merely touch upon those aspects of the story that are most relevant to the topic of this discussion. Let us first recall that Slovenia seceded from Yugoslavia following a ten-day ‘war’ – actually little more than a skirmish – between some Yugoslav Army units and the Slovenian civilian defence, and that Macedonia was allowed to depart without a single shot being fired. But the Serbo-Croatian-speaking area became the scene of some of the worst atrocities since World War II, and language was readily drawn upon in bolstering up Our cause and satanising Their sides. Just before the war broke out in Croatia and then in BosniaHerzegovina, and while it was in progress, haunting images of the fratricidal killings of 1941–45 were invoked to reinforce the psychological wall between Croats and Serbs on those territories. These images found their chief expression in reviving and shamelessly exploiting the labels of Ustasi and Cetniks. Their historical reference was, respectively, to fascist military units of the wartime Croatian state and to royalist Serb guerillas, each remembered by the other side as merciless killers. When the war struck Bosnian soil, the Muslim side there was pictured by their Serb and Croat adversaries as Islamic ‘holy warriors’, inevitably recalling the centuries of Turkish oppression. Moreover, these labels were extended to cover entire ethnic populations, not just the men on the battlefields; in the propagandist discourses of the parties in conflict, the Others were variously constructed as genocidal Serb-haters, Byzantine barbarians, Jihad fanatics, and the like. With representations like these, it was not difficult to harden the previously softened ethnic boundaries. An immediate consequence of such manipulation and of the horrible experience of masses of people of all ethnic backgrounds during the war years and thereafter was the dramatic drop in Yugoslav national declaration according to the 1991 and subsequent censuses in all segments of what had been Yugoslavia. Another was the thousands of broken

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mixed marriages and the sad fate of their descendants throughout the former federation. In a word, the partly submerged ethnicity quickly surfaced with the fierce onslaught of nationalism, and many a convinced Yugoslav stiffened into an exemplary Serb, Croat or Muslim. As is common with nationalism, ordinary folk were forcibly reduced to a single dimension, that of national affiliation, then rounded up in ethnic enclosures and sent to fight and die for the national cause. So much for the ethnonational side. But what about language? The first thing to emphasise here is that linguistic differences in themselves certainly did not cause the conflicts. The real causes were primarily political, having to do with the maintenance and redistribution of power among the republican élites after the fall of communism and its replacement with nationalism. This fact, however, was deliberately obscured by patriotic rhetoric and propaganda based on the exploitation of ethnic differences. (For more on this issue, which falls outside the scope of our topic, see Bugarski, 2001; some pertinent remarks to the same effect are made in Smith, 1997.) In assessing the possible role of language as an independent cause of the wars, it is instructive to recall that in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the scene of the worst killings and of massive ethnic cleansing, the Muslims, Serbs and Croats all spoke hardly distinguishable and often identical dialects, and on the standard-language level, a language that was likewise for all practical purposes one and the same in both substance and structure. Under such circumstances any semblance of miscommunication is simply unthinkable, the area being an exemplary multiethnic but unilingual community of communication. But this is not to say that language did not matter at all – only that conflicts did not break out over linguistic disputes. On the other hand, language was indeed harnessed in constructing the enemies, and in the course of war the normally quite insignificant linguistic divisions that did exist were blown up and manipulated by stressing their symbolic value in relation to ethnic allegiance. Related to these efforts was a peculiar demonstration of the determination to affirm in a symbolic fashion the alleged – though largely false – ethnic purity of territories. This was the practice of changing toponyms felt to have the wrong ethno-historical associations, ‘serbianising’ or ‘croatising’ them in an attempt to project imagined frontiers back into the past. For example, the town of Foc˘a in eastern Bosnia, close to Serbia, got rechristened as Srbinje (roughly: Serbville), whereas Duvno in western Herzegovina, traditionally a Croat nationalist stronghold, was called Tomislavgrad (Tomislav City, after a medieval Croatian king). This, then, was a way of purifying history as well as geography and language. If language was made an agent in the break-up of Yugoslavia, as just suggested, it was also a major casualty in this process, in that Serbo-Croatian officially ceased to exist. A child of the Yugoslav idea from the very start, it shared its fate and was now buried, appropriately enough, in the same tomb with the federation whose precarious unity it had symbolised and in part supported. In effect, what happened was that internal language boundaries became external, with a few deviations and adjustments here and there. That is to say, as the Serbo-Croatian speaking republics of former Yugoslavia turned into

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sovereign states, so the variants of this language were elevated to the rank of the national standard languages of these states, bearing simple rather than compound names: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian. We shall deal with this change and its implications below. At this point, however, it will be worthwhile to note two interesting attempts to force a kind of unification on heavily resistant material. The first of these was the decision of the political leaders of Bosnian Serbs, in 1993, to make Ekavian the favoured official pronunciation in the Serb Republic, a purely Ijekavian territory. The argument advanced in support of this linguistically indefensible imposition was that the time had finally come for the Serbs of Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia to unite culturally and linguistically – with an eye, no doubt, on the desired political unification as well – by adopting Ekavian, proclaimed to be the only truly Serb pronunciation. (In this psychological model, Ijekavian was hopelessly ‘contaminated’ by being also used by Muslims and Croats.) An opposing argument on the same terms, that this would make it easier for Montenegrin separatists to press for Montenegrin (being Ijekavian) as a language distinct from Serbian, was conveniently disregarded by Serbian nationalists. In their turn, principled opponents of this move saw it as part of the war effort and of the programme to create Great Serbia on the ruins of Yugoslavia. In any case, the decision was revoked in February 1998, following the change of the political leadership. It deserves to go on record as a ruthless attempt to make a whole population shift their normal speech and writing in public and professional functions for the sake of a mystical unity of the national spirit. In our present context the episode may be seen as an instance of ethnicity holding its own under the attack of nationalism, in that the local ethnic vernacular resisted the imposition of what in terms of pronunciation amounts to an external, if not quite alien, standard. And so another artificial attempt at unification fell through. What the outcome of our second example will be is yet to be seen. This revolves round the official name of the language in the other ‘entity’ of BosniaHerzegovina, the Bosniak-Croat Federation, and represents a clash between the ethnic and territorial principles. Namely, the intellectual and political leaders of the Bosniaks (i.e. recently renamed Serbo-Croatian-speaking Muslims), who during the war years apparently still believed that the former Yugoslav republic could somehow survive as a viable state, and who obviously no longer wanted to call their language Serbo-Croatian – let alone Serbian or Croatian! – decided on the name Bosnian. This designation, which had some tradition to back it up in that it had intermittently occurred in the old days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, gained a measure of international recognition by being entered in the documents of the Dayton Accords of 1995, which put an end to the war. The idea was that all citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Muslims, Serbs and Croats, would in effect identify with Bosnian as the common language of the country. It immediately became transparent, however, that this was merely wishful thinking, not to say a misfired political calculation. In reality, of course, local Serbs stuck to Serbian, Croats to Croatian, with ‘Bosnian’ thus reduced to ethnic Bosniaks only. Furthermore, as we shall see in the next section, the

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language so named is being tailored to fit this last group, with no regard to the other two. Consequently, the label ‘Bosnian’ is now widely regarded as a misnomer for what should actually be called ‘Bosniak’ – at least by Serbs and Croats both within and outside Bosnia-Herzegovina. This, then, looks very much like another failed unifying effort, quite different in substance but perhaps complementary in spirit with the one made at the same time across the ‘entity’ border.

Language Planning Perspectives The destiny of standard Serbo-Croatian yields important insights into what is likely to happen when a common language splits up into variants with the administrative status of separate national standards. As might be expected in the light of what is known about constructing ethnic, national and other collective identities, these rival standards have to be built up individually, each measuring itself against the Other – or, in this case, the Others. The ball started rolling, as we saw, with the departure of Croatian from Serbo-Croatian, so it naturally fell to Croatian to assert and substantiate its separate identity. How could this be done? A simple change of official name was obviously not enough, so internal interventions were gradually made, affecting certain points of orthography and grammar along with sizeable sections of the lexicon. In the latter, actual or perceived Serbisms, but also well-established internationalisms common in Serbia, were in large numbers replaced with Croatian regionalisms and revived archaisms, as well as with neologisms. These measures, in part artificial, had the effect of making Croatian visibly different from Serbian, especially in official registers. The next to be carved out of Serbo-Croatian was Bosnian, which had to be made to look at least reasonably different from both Serbian and Croatian, a by no means simple task. The only way to achieve this, even to a very limited extent, was by stressing – in pronunciation and orthography, but especially in vocabulary and phraseology – the Oriental heritage of the Bosniaks, whose Islamic faith had for centuries been reflected in proportionately greater usage of Turkisms (themselves not infrequently derived from Persian or Arabic sources) by comparison with Serbs or Croats. Finally, the ground has already been prepared by a group of amateur enthusiasts for a Montenegrin language – in the event of its official recognition under that name – to differ somewhat from Serbian, of which it is, linguistically speaking, a regional variety. Once again there was only one way to do this – unfortunately for its advocates, rather unconvincing: by re-establishing or even inventing peculiarities harking back to Montenegrin dialectal features and folklore traditions, scarcely a promising route for a standard language in the 21st century. But linguistic engineering has its price, especially when the Others happen to be too much like Us! (For more on all these developments see Bugarski, 1997b, 1997c, 2000b, 2002, Bugarski & Hawkesworth [forthcoming]). The remaining and in some ways central portion of Serbo-Croatian, Serbian, is under these circumstances undergoing a mild identity crisis. It stays put, so to speak, as it watches its congeners diverge along their newly laid separate tracks. In contrast to them it lacks the vision of a unique, well-defined norm and still embraces the two dualities of pronunciation and script, as if uttering

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a nostalgic sigh in remembrance of a happier common past. While some take a broad-minded view of this state of affairs, others tend to see in it an embarrassment of riches detrimental to national identity and unity. Individual exponents of the latter position have on occasion advocated a return to the old Illyrian idea of introducing the written symbol e˘ in place of the former jat, whereby everybody would spell a word like de˘te ´child´ uniformly but would pronounce it their own way, as /dete/ or /dijete/. This proposal never gained currency, presumably because it would constitute a radical break with cultural tradition and hence cause more problems than it solved. As to alphabet, Serb nationalists have insisted on Cyrillic to the exclusion of the ´Croatian´ Latin, but such a clear-cut distinction is reflected neither in official documents nor in public or private written usage in Serbia or Montenegro. Incidentally, however, such insistence on the strict delimitation of ´ours´ from ´theirs´ has contributed to confusions in some library catalogues abroad, where everything printed in Yugoslavia in Latin tends to be automatically classified as being in the Croatian language, even if actually written by Serbs and in Serbian. Not surprisingly perhaps, such practice is then denounced by the Serb nationalist intelligentsia as deliberate cultural theft! It is not the business of this report to speculate on possible future developments. Let us just say that if the current divergent trends continue for several generations, as now seems likely, the successors of Serbo-Croatian may become truly distinct languages not only politically but also linguistically, in proportion to the reduced mutual comprehensibility. (Students of ethnicity and nationalism might well find this a logical outcome, given the prevailing historical conditions, in that this language, shared by several nations, had been a relatively weak carrier of specific ethnic identity throughout its life cycle.) The question ‘How different is different enough?’, which in a sense underlies the present discussion, would then no longer arise, and language planners in the service of ethnic nation-building would have registered a long-awaited field day. Before concluding this section, let us descend once more to the ground level of the vernaculars, which brings us back to internal boundaries in a way that opens up new potential issues for language planning, especially in Serbia, in connection with minorities old and new. In former Yugoslavia – most notably in the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina – the numerous ethnic groups lived harmoniously side by side, even with a high degree of intermingling in a truly multilingual and intercultural setting, where ethnic boundaries were virtually mere fences. In this region the situation still remains the same in principle, despite certain inevitable setbacks. Yet this interethnic – and indeed, as we shall see, intraethnic – harmony has been seriously disturbed by the appearance of the so-called new minorities. This label refers to groups finding themselves on the wrong side of the reshuffled borders or displaced in various enclaves. Probably the most striking new development in this context is the sad fate of the hundreds of thousands of refugees from war-stricken areas. Their displacement led to upheavals and rearrangements on the dialectal level, an occurrence possibly unique in present-day Europe and hence of considerable theoretical interest in addition to the human import of their suffering. This

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meant that whole local dialects were often literally lifted from their home ground and transplanted into other speech communities.4 The linguistic implications of these processes were less evident with Croat and Muslim refugees from Serb-dominated parts of Croatia and Bosnia, who either moved to other Ijekavian regions or, notably in the case of the Muslims, ended up abroad; but in Serbia they quickly came to full expression. During the last decade over half a million refugees from Croatia and Bosnia, but later also from Serbia’s southern province of Kosovo, flooded central Serbia and Vojvodina, to stay there for an indefinite length of time. The vast majority of these unfortunate people are Serbs, so that in ethnic or religious terms they do not differ from their new environment. However, they mostly speak the Ijekavian version of Serbo-Croatian, and are thus spotted as different by the indigenous Ekavian population the moment they open their mouths. Given the economic plight of the majority of the local people themselves as well as of the immigrants, the ‘alien’ speech of the latter contributed to their construction, by their hesitant hosts, as unwelcome guests, even a menace. In this way relatively subtle linguistic differences, being the sole marker of otherness (if we discount occasional cultural peculiarities), built a psychological wall round the newly arrived, reinforcing negative stereotypes about the newcomers on one side and inducing collective anomie on the other. The vacillation between sticking to one’s own code and adapting to the new one typically results in code-mixing, which hardly helps. Even switching to Ekavian is not enough if one inadvertently uses the ‘wrong’ lexical item. To cite just one example, a customer complained about being refused service in a market just because she had asked for a vrecˇica rather than a kesa (the two words being, respectively, Croatian and Serbian for a plastic bag)! This whole problem area has not yet been recognised by official language policy in Serbia, nor have there been sociolinguistic studies of this new phenomenon. (The first attempt to call attention to it is Petrovic´, 2001.)

Conclusion What is the net result of all the developments recorded in the foregoing presentation? It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, after some 150 years of conflicting strategies, of alternating love-hate relationships, of acts of unification and separation, including two attempts at creating a common state based in part on a shared linguistic network, the Yugoslav nations are eventually winding up in separate states, complete with their distinct national languages. In this instance, then, the Romantic ideal of the congruence of nation, state and language has proved more durable than in most others, even now in the face of the overwhelming processes of globalisation. The borders thus established, and fortified by linguistic means, do not at present look like dissolving once more, at least in the foreseeable future. But then – who knows? As observers have remarked long ago, in this part of the world it is unwise to take anything for granted! In more general terms, there is some theoretical interest in the way this case study corroborates current views of the nature of ethnicity and nationalism, and of the role of language in them, as set forth in our opening remarks. We have seen how fluid ethnicity can stiffen into hard nationalism in times of

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anxiety and conflict; also, how the latter may contribute to the formation and dissolution of states. We have further noted the ways in which ethnic boundaries may be weakened or strengthened in these processes, playing down or intensifying the distinction between Us and Them. With reference to nationality as declared in population censuses, which are usually regarded as a fuller and more conscious expression of ethnic identity, it is instructive to observe that such declaration has significantly varied between successive Yugoslav censuses in a manner not explicable by demographic factors. Such variation in national affiliation, no doubt testifying to a wavering sense of ethnicity, has been striking in some population groups (Muslims, nationally declared Yugoslavs, Montenegrins, Turks, Romas, Vlahs). That there is nothing primordial or immutable about ethnicity is perhaps best shown in the case of the Serbo-Croatian-speaking Muslims, mostly concentrated in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Originally of Slavic descent (mostly Serb, some Croat), they took up Islamic faith for pragmatic reasons during the centuries of Turkish rule there, an option regarded to this day by ardent Serb and Croat nationalists as an act of national treason. In their eyes this justifies treating present-day Muslims with scorn and calling them Turks, particularly but not exclusively in the war years. But more to the point is the fact that this sizeable ethnoreligious group has changed its name – though not its language or religion – repeatedly across the censuses, depending on the available administrative slots. In more recent times the range has included identification as Serbs or Croats, then ‘nationally undeclared’, from 1971 as Muslims and finally from 1991 as Bosniaks. (Incidentally, but interestingly, their offspring even from monoethnic marriages were not infrequently given ethnically neutral first names, reflecting a preference for a low ethnic profile in a mixed community. This may now be changing, however.) An added complication is that Muslims living in Serbia are pressing for a Bosniak nomination in the forthcoming census, whereas those residing in Montenegro are mostly in favour of keeping their Muslim designation. As regards the role of language in ethnicity, Yugoslav censuses provide a possibility of comparison not usually available in other countries, by asking separate questions about nationality and mother tongue. With all the due reservations that generally apply to such figures, the returns here are notable for some considerable discrepancies, with many members of certain ethnic groups reporting the ‘wrong’ mother tongue. Thus the census taken in 1981, while Yugoslavia was still of a piece, records numerous minority members (including some 40,000 Hungarians) as Serbo-Croatian-speakers. Conversely, of the 135,000 declared speakers of Vlah only 32,000 expressed Vlah nationality, the others declaring themselves as Serbs. There were also Serbo-Croatianspeaking Slovenes, Albanians and Macedonians, Slovenian-or Italianspeaking Croats, Albanian-speaking Muslims, Macedonian speaking Turks, etc. (For these and related data see Bugarski & Hawkesworth, 1992.) Such ‘deviations’ speak for themselves. But more generally, language has played a varying part in establishing and maintaining the identities of the officially recognised Yugoslav nations. This link has been strongest in the case of Slovenes, who largely have their distinct language to thank for having avoided assimilation by their more numerous and powerful neighbours, as already

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noted. The Macedonians likewise owe the fruition of their distinctive national consciousness to the recent recognition and development of their standard language. The language–nation bond is somewhat weaker though still quite strong with the Croats, less so with the Serbs, to weaken yet further in the case of the Montenegrins and Muslims, whose ethnonational evolution had little to do with the language they shared with the Serbs and Croats. We may add, parenthetically, that even religion is not always a reliable guide to nationality, any more than language. Serbs and Montenegrins, now of different nationalities, are both Greek Orthodox, and in parts of the Adriatic coast where ethno-religious mixing had been intense for centuries there are still some Roman Catholic Serbs. Among the Albanians, who are predominantly of Islamic faith, some Catholics and even Orthodox can be found. Many Bosnian ethnic Muslims persist in opting for Serb or Croat national affiliation. And so on – more ‘asymmetric’ relations could be adduced to show the complexity and variability of ethnic and national identity. Lastly, enough has been said about the important part language has played, in diverse ways, in the processes of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of states on the territory of former Yugoslavia. And, more broadly speaking, the case study presented in this article provides a specific perspective on the currently much-studied but still perplexing twin capacity of borders to divide and connect. Notes 1. A brief general discussion of the topic of language and boundaries may be found in Bugarski (1997a). The multilingual collection in which that paper appeared (Jaks˘ic˘, 1997) contains contributions on various facets of borders in ex-Yugoslavia and the Balkans. Our bird’s-eye view of the situation to be described is merely tangential to the detailed current research on dialect convergence and divergence in Europe in relation to political borders, as exemplified most recently by Kallen (2000). 2. This area provides a good example of situations where it seems more appropriate to talk about ‘linguistic shatter zones’ (Custred, 1997: 45) than about language boundaries. 3. These descriptions fully corroborate the observation that ‘construction of a discourse which ennobles, explains and justifies the war is as essential a part of preparation for war as weapon production’ (Wright, 1997: 226). 4. On a small scale, such instances of enforced mobility may be seen as adding a new angle to D. S˘kiljan’s perspicacious discussion in this volume of the relations between language and territory.

References Alexander, R. (2000) In Honor of Diversity: The Linguistic Resources of the Balkans. The Kenneth E. Naylor Memorial Lecture Series in South Slavic Linguistics, No. 2. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University. Barth, F. (ed.) (1969) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. Bugarski, R. (1992) Language in Yugoslavia: Situation, policy, planning. In Bugarski and Hawkesworth (1992), pp. 10–26. Bugarski, R. (1997a) Language and boundaries. In Jaks˘ic (1997), pp. 227–33. Bugarski, R. (1997b) A problem of language identity: The comparative linguistics of Serbo-Croatian. In A.Ahlqvist and V. C˘apková (eds) Dán do Óide: Essays in Memory of Conn R.Ó Cléirigh (pp. 67–73). Dublin: The Linguistics Institute of Ireland.

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Bugarski, R. (1997c) Language-internal conflict and language dissolution. In Wölck and de Houwer (1997) (pp. 29–35). Bugarski, R. (2000a) Discourses of war and peace. Folia Linguistica XXXIV: 3–4,129–45. Bugarski, R. (2000b) Serbo-Croatian: How many languages? In B. Kunzmann-Müller (ed.) Die Sprachen Südosteuropas heute – Umbrüche und Aufbruch (pp. 192–99). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Bugarski, R. (2001) Language, nationalism and war in Yugoslavia. In M. Radovanovic´ and R.A. Major (eds) Serbian Sociolinguistics (=International Journal of the Sociology of Language 151), 69–87. Bugarski, R. (2002) Serbo-Croatian and its descendants: A case of Umbau? In R .Luc˘ic´ (ed.) Lexical Norm and National Language – Lexicography and Language Policy in SouthSlavic Languages after 1989 (pp. 145–49). München: Verlag Otto Sagner, Bugarski, R. and Hawkesworth, C. (eds) (1992) Language Planning in Yugoslavia. Columbus, OH: Slavica. Bugarski, R. and Hawkesworth, C. (eds) (forthcoming) Language in the Former Yugoslav Lands. Columbus, OH: Slavica. Custred, G. (1997) Language boundaries. In Wölck and de Houwer (1997), pp. 45–50. Edwards, J. (1985) Language, Society and Identity. Oxford: Blackwell. Eriksen, T.H. (1993) Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives. London & Sterling, VA: Pluto Press. Greenberg, R.D. (1996) The politics of dialects among Serbs, Croats and Muslims in the former Yugoslavia. East European Politics and Societies 10(3) 393–415. Jaks˘ic, B. (ed.) (1997) Granice – izazov interkulturalnosti/Frontiers – The Challenge of Interculturality. Belgrade: Forum za etni_ke odnose/Forum for Ethnic Relations. Kallen, J.L. (ed.) (2000) The Role of Political Borders in the Convergence and Divergence of Dialects in Europe (=International Journal of the Sociology of Language 145). Petrovic´, T. (2001) Speaking a different Serbian language: Refugees in Serbia between conflict and integration. Journal of Liberal Arts (Thessaloniki) 6(1) 97–108. Smith, D. (1997) Language and discourse in conflict and conflict resolution. Current Issues in Language and Society 4(3) 190–214. Wölck, W. and de Houwer, A. (eds) (1997) Recent Studies in Contact Linguistics. Bonn: Dümmler (Plurilingua, XVIII). Wright, S. (1997) Language as a contributing factor in conflicts between states and within states. Current Issues in Language and Society 4(3) 215–37.

Chapter 4

Troubled Multicultural Broadcasting in Macedonia DONA KOLAR-PANOV Ss Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, Republic of Macedonia What is nowadays called multiculturalism can be tracked back to the 1960s when new social movements in the United States (civil rights and feminism) began to assert a new kind of political resistance. Michel Foucault has distinguished between three kinds of resistance to exploitation, domination and subjection (1982: 212). The first is to economic exploitation and asserts the right to the material means of life; the second is to religious and political oppression and asserts the civil right to conscience, speech and so forth; the third is to forms of subjection that deny one’s identity, and asserts the right to be publicly as one wishes to be. It is in this third arena of struggle that the new kind of identity politics emerged, a struggle against prevailing social attitudes that marginalise particular groups by denying or failing to recognise their claims on the basis of gender or ethnicity. Charles Taylor has called this shift from hard political and economic issues ‘the politics of recognition’ (Taylor, 1994). In this struggle, the marginalised groups seek recognition and acceptance by the mainstream, and cultural issues of definition and representation assume a central importance for those who perceive themselves as under-represented or misinterpreted in the mainstream culture. Such struggles often focus on the media as a daily embodiment of the culture of the mainstream. As multiculturalism highlights certain difficulties in the politics of cultural representation today (see Dines & Humez, 1995) we should note that today all of us inhabit many different cultural spaces shared by many others as we all belong simultaneously to global, national, regional and local cultures (Giddens, 1990). The complexities of cultural tastes in all their polymorphous diversity are reflected in the ever increasing number of transnational television channels as well as the mushrooming of local media outlets. Cable and satellite services continue to expand to more and more households as the convergence of Internet and television brings us into the as yet uncharted waters of the media of the future (see Seiter, 1999). The broadcasting systems of newly democratised states such as Macedonia, besides going through a technological revolution in communications, also experience transformation of the politico-institutional network into a democracy which includes the recognition of the cultural diversity of the country. Because of this, television and policy makers, regulators and practitioners must be sensitive to local dynamics and must engage in dialogue with those whose lives they want to make visible and whose voices they want to make heard. (Robins, Cornford & Aksoy, 1997: 19)

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The Macedonian state envisages the creation of Macedonian identity and culture on the basis of diversity and multicultural elements, and has attempted to foster this by providing on national public broadcasting, MKRTV (Makedonska radio i televizija), a space in which the diverse cultures of Macedonian minorities could have a voice, in this way creating a space in which different voices could participate in a collective dialogue in Macedonian society. As language and language rights are seen as central to the expression of cultural identities, MKRTV broadcasts programmes for minorities which are known as ‘programmes in the languages of nationalities’. These programmes are supposed to fulfil the function of representation of minorities and minority cultures in their own language with the aim of catering to various ethnic groups that are parts of the Macedonian population. However, these ‘programmes in the languages of nationalities’ are very much a child of Tito’s Yugoslavia and its socialist policies of centralised broadcasting, with a symbolic gesture towards ethnic minorities. When former Yugoslavia disintegrated and Macedonia was established as an independent state, the media were deregulated, leaving an open space for the creation of new, so-called independent media and giving a chance to the minorities to establish their own media organisations, both print and electronic. Also the former state, now public, service broadcaster MKRTV already under its new mandate aimed towards establishing programme values in which the society as a whole was represented, and even if the second channel of MKRTV had programmes designated for ‘nationalities’ there was a need to increase the hours and variety of programming for ethnic minorities. Consequently, there was a considerable increase in the number of broadcast hours for the Albanian minority and programmes for Turkish, Roma, Vlach and Serbian minorities were also added.1 It could be argued that, besides giving a voice to those minorities on the one hand, on other hand it only increased the ghetto-effect, the bracketing-out of the minorities in special ‘minority’ programmes that are ignored by the majority and do not always appeal to the minority. As a result of the desire to give expression to a particular ethnic group, but not particularly for the mainstream, remaining rather within and for a particular ethnic community, television and radio stations were formed at a local level with print media somewhat lagging behind. As any description of the Macedonian media and media culture needs to take into account a number of sociopolitical and historical factors, it is necessary to give a short overview of the development of Macedonian media systems and regulation for the period after Macedonia become independent from the Former Yugoslavia.

Background to Multicultural Television in Macedonia It was before Macedonian independence from former Yugoslavia, in the mid 1980s, that changes in the broadcast media (especially television) started. The centralised broadcasting system of the former Yugoslavia (see Golubovic´, 1983) was still functioning, but more and more people acquired home satellite dishes and more and more neighbourhoods installed satellite master antenna television (SMATV), giving a chance to join the transnational audiences watching international and other television channels.

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With the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the centralised broadcasting system disintegrated also, and after Macedonian independence in 1991, the country was left with a relatively weak state-run media and with a broadcasting law from 1976, and no new legislation regarding the media. The same transitional difficulties were faced by Macedonia as by other new states of Eastern and Central Europe (see Splichal, 1994) with a rapid growth in the number of socalled independent media and a too close relationship between the government and state broadcasting. The lack of professional journalistic standards and the problem of an absence of legal codes, coupled with deep economic crisis, made the development of independent, private (commercial) media and the creation of a competitive media market even more difficult. However, if all the former communist and socialist countries were facing the media transition in difficult economic and fractured sociopolitical circumstances, there is an additional aspect to the Macedonian situation and that is its multiethnic population (see Pettifer, 2001) which gave the media development a distinctive inflection. There are 66.6% Macedonians; 22.7% Albanians; 4.01% Turks; 2.2% Roma; 0.4% Vlachs; 2.10% Serbs; and 1.9% others (see Statistical Office of Republic of Macedonia, 1996). The notorious Macedonian crisis of legitimacy and its dispute with Greece over the name of the state meant being cut off from European Union sources of economic aid, and the constant predictions of possible conflict with the Albanian minority (which unfortunately came true) kept away any serious foreign investment. Aid for the development of democratic media came from the Council of Europe, but was earmarked as being for the development of human rights, while of particular importance was the assistance provided by the United States and the Open Society Institute backed by billionaire maverick American financier George Soros, whose personal intervention was critical. The issues of freedom of speech and protection of the rights of the minorities surfaced as the main principles for the formation of the first independent media outlets. Other NGOs such as ‘Press Now’ joined in helping the establishment of free media until their development and existence completely depended on donations from NGOs, which were taking over services that should be provided by the state. With Soros funds supporting independent media, especially minority media, and the Council of Europe being concerned with human-rights issues, the stage was inevitably set for issues of human rights to assume central public significance. Indeed, an interesting characteristic of the Macedonian media-political system is the encouragement it gives to public discourses of free speech and autonomy as a means of trading off and securing political positions and concessions. As the new Macedonian Constitution (1991) allows every citizen and legal person to establish a mass medium, it was not a surprise that in the absence of media regulation and legislative rules and with the availability of donor money for encouraging the growth of free independent media, many new broadcast media came into existence, with independent newspapers developing later. A chaotic and crowded media landscape developed. In these circumstances of a loosely legal framework and recognition of the need for independent media as one of the prerequisites for the development of democracy (Dahlgren, 1995), the new broadcasting law was introduced in

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1997. The Broadcasting Council as a regulatory body was formed and the first licences for operation of commercial broadcast media were issued. However, the performance of the Macedonian legal framework regarding media today provides evidence for one kind of institutional failure; this is embedded in the failure to create a regulatory framework within which a private media market could effectively develop, and the failure to help the slow pace of reform of MKRTV taking it from state to public broadcaster. The second kind of institutional failure is embedded in the political and practical difficulty of implementation that the broadcasting law is faced with, since the Broadcasting Council has no power to enforce the legislation. Because of this there are more and more voices calling for the amendment of the broadcasting law in Macedonia. At the moment there are 51 commercial television channels, 49 at local level and two at national level, there are three public television channels at national level and 11 public TV channels at local level. Besides the licensed TV stations there are a number of illegal television stations at local level, the number of which varies greatly, as they are often being closed down by the government. The number of commercial and public licensed television and radio stations that broadcast in languages of nationalities on local levels is as follows: Albanian – 6 commercial radio, and 6 public radio stations; 12 commercial TV channels; Romany – 2 commercial television channels and 4 commercial radio stations. In addition there are five commercial TV channels that have some programming in Turkish and one TV channel in Serbian. There is also one commercial radio station that broadcasts in Vlach. As mentioned earlier, the second TV channel of MKRTV is dedicated to broadcasting in languages of nationalities, and broadcasts in Albanian, Romany, Serbian, Turkish and Vlach. The broadcasting law (1997) contains the legislation regarding broadcast media in Macedonia and consists of the Broadcasting Activity Law, Telecommunications Law and Concession Law (Broadcasting Council, 1998: 36–57). Among other things, the broadcasting law reinforces the constitutional right to freedom of expression and guarantees minority cultural rights. The obligations regarding cultural and linguistic matters are regulated also. For our purposes it is necessary to point out the contents of Article 8 of the Law on Broadcasting Activity (Broadcasting Council, 1998: 37) which highlights the following principles: • true and timely providing of information; • openness for free competition and providing information on different political ideas, cultural and other tendencies and opinions; • preservation and nurturing of the national identity, language, culture and domestic creation; • promotion of tolerance, and respect for and nurturing of cultural diversity. It is this last paragraph that has been constantly violated by some media, and some newly established television channels in languages of minorities, instead of promoting the development of cultural and linguistic recognition, have created a parallel media system. This has led to cultural separatism in the

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case of the Albanian-language media and community, while the Romany language media retained the balance of the multicultural representation. The media survey MAP 2000 (Kolar-Panov, Van Den Haute and Markovic, 2000) shows that the Albanian-language television and radio are watched and listened to by an almost exclusively Albanian audience, while the Romanylanguage television is viewed by audiences belonging to all ethnic groups. The results for TV BTR, the national Romany-language local television in Skopje, and TV ERA, the Albanian-language local television in Skopje, show the following: BTR national is watched by 57.5% Macedonians, 27.4% Romanies, 1.1% Albanians, 1.9% Vlachs, 7.4% Serbs and 4.8% other, while TV ERA, the Albanian-language local TV, is watched by 95.1% Albanians, 3.3% Turks, 0.5% Macedonians, 0.5% Romanies and 0.5% others (Kolar-Panov, Van Den Haute and Markovic, 2000: 245 and 249).

A Short Comparative Analysis of TV BTR National and TV ERA Programmes For the Albanian community, the question of the development of identity, especially when linked to language, has been fundamental in asserting their position inside Macedonian society. Questions pertaining to the use of the Albanian language were crucial to the issues on which demands were founded for changes to the Macedonian constitution and the basis for framework agreement for peace in Macedonia (BBC News Europe, 2001). The Albanian community is the second largest linguistic community (according to last census there are 22.7% Albanians in Macedonia, but some unofficial sources put this number higher). The great difference between the Macedonian and Albanian languages, which belong to different linguistic groups and use different alphabets, led the Albanian community to perceive themselves in a situation of linguistic inferiority as far as the now official Macedonian language is concerned, especially in the areas of public administration, education and media. This self-perception of marginalisation was one of the factors that led to an armed conflict in spring 2001. There is a cross-state and cross-frontier character to the Albanian, Turkish and Serbian languages, which means that media from outside the Macedonian borders often influence minority audiences. As cultural identification can exist both within and across nation states, this can often be different from or in direct conflict with what might be called the national culture of a nation state. As modern nation states like Macedonia are not homogeneous, inevitably any representation that attempts to figure out the national does so at the expense of other cultural communities; also, the circulation of cultural texts from other places (as in the case of the Albanian community from Kosovo and Albania) tends not to serve the interests and needs of the national population, both because the texts inevitably refer to a foreign situation and because they are imbued with values that the national population does not necessarily share with the original audience. Even though the geographical proximity of Albania and Kosovo allowed some viewing of Albanian-language television programmes to those with powerful enough antennas, it is the advent of satellite television that has changed the situation practically. Albanian state television launched a satellite

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channel in the late 1980s, while Turkish TGRT International has one of the best networks of satellite TV channels, some of which are aimed at the Turkish diaspora worldwide (Aksoy, 1997). With the establishment of local commercial TV channels in Macedonia, satellite channels either in the language of the minority or channels that had cultural or religious proximity, such as TV Dubai for the Islamic community, were rebroadcast by both Albanian and Romany local TV stations, especially at the times of Muslim religious holidays. However, rebroadcasting programmes from other countries was easy and cheap and the space for autonomous local production that would reflect local cultural values was shrinking. This was especially noticeable in the news and information programming. There is a great difference here between the two Romany TV channels and the number of TV channels in the Albanian language. The TV channels in Romany produce their own news and broadcast it in both the Romany and Macedonian languages, in this way bringing the Romany community closer to the political and social reality of the country they live in and thus promoting the integration of the Romany community into Macedonian society. BTR National also produces documentaries and cultural magazines which address issues pertaining to the local Macedonian Romany community and produces programmes which promote the recovery of the historical memory of the Romany as a people. BTR also takes part in community development and shares in promoting community-based projects run by various NGOS, such as action against domestic violence, as well as taking an active part in various affirmative action campaigns, such as UNICEF’s campaign for breast-feeding. In this way the Romany-language commercial local television is performing the function, to an extent, of the public broadcaster. BTR also takes over the role of a town square as they broadcast a programme called ‘Good wishes and Congratulations’ in which announcements of births, weddings, birthdays, circumcisions, etc. are accompanied by a musical request. It looks like this: the photo of a happy couple, child or family is put on the screen, the announcer reads the message (this being either an announcement by the party celebrating the event or a wish from family and friends), and then a music video is played. The music video is often accompanied by the appearance of the photograph of the party celebrating the event. This form is an adaptation of the well-known format of the musical request show on radio, which is not culturally specific but is practised around the world in different formats. The programme of ‘Good wishes and Congratulations’ is popular with both the Romany and Macedonian communities, and often Macedonian viewers place a musical request within these programmes. The other characteristic of the BTR national television is that it often subtitles its programmes that are produced in Romany in Macedonian, giving an opportunity to the Macedonian mainstream audience for cultural learning and a better understanding of the Romany culture. The entertainment that is produced locally, especially talk shows and quiz programmes that are most often copy-cat (Moran, 1998) versions of American shows, are produced in Romany, while foreign films and documentaries are usually subtitled in Macedonian, probably for the reason that as they are of a commercial nature, it

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would be too expensive to subtitle them in Romany for such a small audience. Bollywood productions of Indian films are very popular and these are also subtitled in Macedonian. BTR also produces children’s programmes, which unfortunately are not subtitled in Macedonian. At the very beginning of its existence, BTR re-broadcast lots of Serbian programmes, mainly musical; but with the broadcasting law regulating the rebroadcasting of foreign programmes it has stopped that practice. BTR broadcasts locally in the Macedonian capital, Skopje, where there is the largest concentration of the Romany population, but the Romany programme on the second channel of the MKRTV also often subtitles its programmes in Romany with Macedonian. The research monitoring project by the Broadcasting Council (Janavska & Skerlev-Cakar, 2001: 21) in April 2001 showed the structure of BTR programmes as follows: 42% of the programmes are music; 28% are film; 8% are various entertainment and 2% are news and information. The largest proportion of the music programmes goes to the above-described culturally specific ‘Good wishes and Congratulations’ – 80%. The same monitoring research (Janavska & Skerlev-Cakar, 2001: 23) shows that ERA television, which broadcasts locally in Skopje in Albanian, broadcasts 88% of its total programmes in Albanian without subtitles, 2% in Turkish and 3% in other languages, while 7% of its programmes are not defined by language. This is in breach of their licence application in which they state that ERA will broadcast 60% in Albanian, 20% in Macedonian, 10% in Turkish and 10% in English. It is clear from the above that, at present, ERA TV has no Macedonian language programming at all. The example of TV ERA is symptomatic of all other commercial Albanianlanguage channels in Macedonia. The linguistic and cultural exclusivism of these broadcasters is seen in the fact that the television channels never provide subtitling in Macedonian, taking away the opportunity from the mainstream audiences for participation and cultural learning in regard to the Albanian community and in this way actively promoting cultural separatism. This is true of commercial TV channels in Albanian but has also become increasingly the practice of the programmes in the Albanian language carried on the second channel of the public television station MKRTV. Programmes for ‘nationalities’ have independent editorial policies which have gone very wrong following the state election in 1998, when the radical Albanian party entered the coalition government. As the government still plays an active role in the appointment of the editorial staff in MKRTV, it was the Albanian coalition party (DPA) that took over the definition of the staff structure, and, indirectly, the party dictated the editorial policies of the programme in Albanian on the second channel of MKRTV. The problems that this kind of political influence can produce first became visible during the Kosovo refugee crisis in 1999, when, for the first time, programmes in the Albanian language broadcast content that was openly hostile to the Macedonian state. Of course, even before that there were incidences of biased reporting, but not to this extent. News from Kosovo was given priority and the positive efforts of the Macedonian state to accommodate the refugees were simply overlooked. Any incidence of misconduct by

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Macedonian police, however isolated, was blown out of proportion, and the rhetoric that ‘Macedonians are worse than Serbs’ gained popularity. The resentment and often hatred that the refugees harboured towards Serbs was now transferred to Macedonians, without any admission of the favourable status of the Albanian minority in Macedonia in comparison with what was happening in Kosovo. Endless interviews with refugees were regular fare on Albanian-language TV channels and the description of atrocities by Serbs deepened the mistrust of Albanians towards Macedonians. The commercial TV stations went even further: their practice even before the refugee crisis was to retransmit news and information programmes from the Albanian state satellite channel as well as radio news from Voice of America and Deutsche Welle in Albania, but with the conflict in Kosovo deepening, they carried open propaganda for the enlistment of the Albanian population of Macedonia into the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Affairs of the Macedonian State, political and economic, were either completely left out or reported negatively, and watching a local Macedonian TV channel in Albanian was like watching local television in Albania. Only occasional advertisements for local businesses would remind us that this is indeed a local TV channel in Macedonia. The almost complete absence of engagement with questions from Macedonian socio-political life, except in cases that addressed the questions of Albanian-minority socio-political affairs, had a negative effect on the participation of the Albanian population in the Macedonian national public sphere. Before the conflict in Macedonia there were relatively few incidents of hate speech in mainstream media or incidences of offensive portrayals of ethnic minorities, mainly because of the established codes of self-censorship. However, it should be noted that the mainstream media did not carry programmes that engaged in portraying the positive, the culture and the everyday life of minorities, leaving the minority portrayals entirely to the ‘programmes in languages of nationalities’ on the second channel of MKRTV. Subtle and not so subtle forms of hate speech emerged in the mainstream media as Macedonia slid towards ethnic conflict. But what was happening in commercial television at a local level in the Albanian language was more than alarming. With the establishment of free media in Kosovo after it become a UN protectorate, the Macedonian local stations turned towards Kosovo for programme rebroadcasting, including news and current affairs. This led to a situation where the majority of the Albanian population in Macedonia lived with Kosovo’s problems on a day-to-day basis, concerned mainly with Kosovo’s political, social and economic issues. The rare news programmes produced by local stations would also concentrate on Kosovo’s problems, and if they did cover Macedonian state affairs they would do so in a manner that showed the Macedonian state as antagonistic and unjust towards the Albanian minority. This led to the paradox that a large portion of the Albanian population, or 23% of the Macedonian population, were more a part of the public sphere of another country – Kosovo – than of a Macedonian public sphere. When the armed conflict started in Macedonia, the two communities, Macedonian and Albanian, were functioning in different public spheres and

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were far apart from each other. The Albanian-language media by now were openly supporting the extremists and the National Liberation Army (NLA) calling for war against Macedonia and for freedom from oppression. Military songs glorifying the Albanian homeland and the fight for freedom and a greater Albania, video spots made for recruitment to the NLA and frequent appearances of the NLA leaders with their fighters showing off weapons or shown in an American-style training drill, became the everyday images carried by the commercial TV channels in the Albanian language. Even the programme in Albanian on the second channel of MKRTV joined the antiMacedonian propaganda. They still covered Macedonian state affairs in their news programmes, but did so in such a way that it always appeared that Macedonians were after Albanian blood. The most symptomatic feature of these news programmes was the omission of news regarding Macedonian losses. For example, if the NLA carried out a massacre or a kidnapping of Macedonians it would just not be reported, or in the case that it was reported it would always be portrayed as self-defence. The Albanian-language programme on MKRTV was heading for disaster. When the Macedonian special police discovered a group of Albanian terrorists planning terrorist attacks on Skopje and killed five in their action, the Albanian-language news on MKRTV reported that the police massacred five Albanian civilians while they were sleeping. This was the last straw for MKRTV’s editorial board, and they announced that the Albanian-language programme would henceforth come under the same editorial policy as the rest of MKRTV, which meant that they would have to comply with the broadcasting law which especially emphasises the requirement not to incite ethnic hatred. This in turn resulted in a strike by Albanian-language programme staff and accusations of breaching their freedom of speech. However, it can be argued that the way in which the Macedonian media dealt with the conflict in the country is symptomatic of a country at war. All the ingredients are present: propaganda, misinformation, manipulation and rumours, all these coming from two sources: the state and the extremist Albanian groups active through the terrorist factions. Public television in Macedonia, which is completely under the control of the government, developed a discourse of subtle racism against Albanians, while the Albanianlanguage channel openly backed the extremists. This was far from the policy of the MKRTV, which was advocating policies of actively working on bringing minority language groups into public space, making them part of the national public sphere and making provision for the effective representation and recognition of all ethnic and linguistic groups within Macedonian society.

Conclusion The vastly improved potential for ethnic communities to import media products from their country of origin and to exploit the possibilities given by new media and communication technologies has enormous implications for media in languages of minorities worldwide. Developments of such transnational media spaces might be the future of broadcasting; however, for now ‘national media still remain central to political and democratic life across the world’ (Robins, Cornford & Aksoy, 1997: 27).

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The existence of a parallel system of Albanian media in Macedonia created a climate of cultural exclusion; this in turn resulted in animosity rather than tolerance. This made efforts to make the Albanian community more visible much harder and made it almost impossible for their voices to be heard in the mainstream. As there is no practice of exchange of programmes between Albanian- and Macedonian-language commercial broadcasters, together with the absence of any programmes in Macedonian on Albanian commercial language television, this – along with the absence of subtitling of any programmes into Macedonian – makes it more than difficult to create a joint public sphere, a space where a dialogue between two communities could be successfully held. This only creates a greater divide between the Albanian and Macedonian communities (as well as between Albanian and other linguistic communities in Macedonia), with a real danger, as Charles Husband says, of generating ‘a series of parallel and mutually exclusive public spheres’ (Husband, 1994: 15), since there can be no progress if the programmes of a particular ethnic group are watched only by the members of that group. Instead of values of cultural dialogue and interaction being promoted, in Macedonia the cultural agenda was turned into a full political agenda and the diversity in broadcasting did not create consensual values but rather brought cultural and political fragmentation. The Albanian population have closed in on themselves and consume only their own media, which makes Macedonia appear a bicultural society consisting of the Macedonian majority and the Albanian minority, and not a multicultural and a multiethnic state; this only proves that the pursuit of cultural rights alone may lead to the dangerous and divisive situation of cultural solipsism, the development of parallel cultures, and cultural apartheid. (Robins, Cornford & Aksoy, 1997: 24) In contrast to the Albanian community in Macedonia, the Romany community seized the opportunity given by the creation of media in Romany and showed that it is possible for the different ethnic and language groups to sustain their identity while still participating in the overall culture of Macedonia and maintaining a common, national political and cultural space. While the Romany community belongs to the Macedonian public sphere, the constant exposure of the Albanian community through transnational broadcasting to media from Kosovo and Albania has not only led to a greater segregation of the Albanian community from the rest of Macedonia, but has also undermined the cohesion of the Macedonian national public sphere. Of course, the orientation of the Albanian community towards broadcasting spaces in Albanian can be seen as a part of a larger picture of the creation of transnational public spaces based, for example, on language or religion, which create ‘new mediated communities’ that are ‘now based on other kinds of affinities that bind’ (Robins, Cornford & Aksoy, 1997: 26). We must recognise the importance of the recognition of the cultural and communicative rights of minorities in Macedonia (and not only in Macedonia), but despite all the advances made in that direction there is plenty of evidence that new forms of cultural separatism and ethnocentrism prevail. The opportunity for forging a multiethnic public sphere in Macedonia is quietly slipping away because the interaction between different publics is not happening.

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What is needed now is for a public dialogue to be sustained, or, as Husband says, what is crucial is ‘the active promotion of a permeable interface between the “mainstream” and the ethnic minority media’ (Husband, 1994). Note 1. Since this article was written, the third channel of the Macedonian public service broadcaster MKRTV has been dedicated ‘for broadcasting for ethnic communities’ (in August 2002), and broadcasts 12 _ hours daily, out of which: 9 _ hours are in Albanian language; 2 hours are in Turkish language and on alternate days _ hour is in each of the following: Vlach, Romany, Bosniak and Serbian languages.

References Aksoy, A. (1997) Reaching the Parts State Television Does Not Reach: Multiculturalism in Turkish Television. In K. Robins (ed.) Programming for People: From Cultural Rights to Cultural Responsibilities, United Nations Television Forum, New York 19–21 Nov 1997, Report presented by RAI, CURDS (Newcastle) and Strategic Information Services EBU. BBC News Europe (2001) Peace deal: What was agreed, 22 August, 2001, Downloaded from http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1504000/1504686.stm Broadcasting Council of the Republic of Macedonia (1998) The Bulletin, Vol. 1. Dahlgren, P. (1995) Television and the Public Sphere: Citizenship, Democracy and the Media. London: Sage. Dines, G. and Humez, J. (1995) Gender, Race and Class in Media. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Foucault, M. (1982) The Subject and Power, Afterword to Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, by H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow. Brighton: Harvester Press. Giddens, A. (1990) Modernity and its Consequences. Cambridge: Polity Press. Golubovic´, T. (1983) Television as an integration factor in Yugoslavia. EBU Review, Programmes, Administration, Law, 34(4) 17–21. http://www.tetovari.com/ Husband, C. (1994) The Multi-ethnic Public Sphere: A Necessary Project, Paper presented to the European Film and Television Studies Conference, London, July 1994. Janavska, E. and Skerlev-Cakar, A. (2001) Programski obvrski za neguvanje na kulturniot identitet vo Zakonot za radiodifuznata dejnost-pregled i ostvaruvanja (Programming obligations for cultivation of cultural identity in the Law for Broadcasting Activity-overview and realisation). In Conference Proceedings of the ‘Radio and televiziskite programi i kulturniot identitet’ (Radio and Television Programmes and Cultural Identity). Skopje: Broadcasting Council of the Republic of Macedonia. Kolar-Panov, D., Van Den Haute, F. and Markovic, M. (eds.) (2000) MAP 2000: Macedonian Media Audience Research Project. Skopje: University of Ss Cyril and Methodius, Institute for Sociological, Political and Juridical Research. Moran, A. (1998) Copycat Television: Globalisation, Program Formats and Cultural Identity. Luton: University of Luton Press. Pettifer, J. (2001) Viewpoint: Macedonian identity, BBC News Europe, 4 July 2001, downloaded from http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1421000/1421988.stm Robins, K., J. Cornford and A. Aksoy, (1997) Overview: From Cultural Rights to Cultural Responsibilities. In K. Robins (ed.) Programming for People: From Cultural Rights to Cultural Responsibilities, United Nations Television Forum, New York 19–21 Nov 1997, Report presented by RAI, CURDS (Newcastle) and Strategic Information Services EBU. Seiter, E. (1999) Television and New Media Audiences. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Splichal, S. (1994) Media Beyond Socialism: Theory and Practice in East-Central Europe. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

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Statistical Office of Republic of Macedonia (1996) The Censuses of Population, Households, Dwellings, and Agricultural Holdings in the Republic of Macedonia, Skopje: Statistical Office of Republic of Macedonia. Taylor, C. (1994) Multiculturalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 5

Debate Codification, Borders and Linguists as Political Actors Kanita Kovacevic (KulturKontakt, Vienna): This concept of naming a language seems to be central to issues raised by all three speakers. I would like to start with regard to the name of the languages, especially the agreement of Novi Sad from 1954, which stated that the language of Serbs, Croats and Montenegrins is the same, without actually naming it. As far as I know, this was also the case with the Vienna Agreement. Do you think that this may have contributed to the disintegration of Serbo-Croatian? Did the fact that the language was not named officially in such agreements make it somehow weaker? Ranko Bugarski (University of Belgrade): You are right. It was not actually named in the Vienna Agreement. In the Novi Sad Agreement, it was named as Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian and it was stated that the two pronunciations were both recognised. But the Novi Sad agreement itself really only reaffirmed the idea behind the Vienna agreement 100 years before, namely that Serbs and Croats really spoke the same language. The only time this changed was during and immediately after the Second World War, when there was strictly Croatian in the so-called independent state of Croatia from 1941 to 1945, and there was Serbian in Serbia, although at that time in Serbia under German occupation there were no particular activities concerning the language. At the same time, in Croatia, there were certain language-engineering activities such as going back to perceived Croat roots, getting rid of perceived internationalisms, and so on. As you know, again decisions were taken during the conclusion of the Novi Sad Agreement in 1954 to produce a common dictionary and a common orthography for Serbo-Croatian, which was what it was called officially from then on in Serbia, and Croato-Serbian in Croatia. Nothing much happened as a result of all of this. The orthography was published in two versions, one in Zagreb in the Latin, and one in Belgrade in the Cyrillic alphabet. However, from the Croat point of view, the orthography was too unitaristic, so it was decided to produce Croat orthographies for the dictionary, which was planned to be published in six volumes by the cultural institutions in Serbia and Croatia respectively. Only the first two volumes were published in both places in Belgrade and Zagreb before the Croatian part of the project was discontinued, and this official double name Serbo-Croatian or CroatoSerbian was used officially for some time. The split really began in Croatia in 1971 and then it was codified in 1974 in the new constitution, which deemed that the Croatian literary language was a language in its own right and not a variety or variant of Serbo-Croatian under the declaration by Croatian intellectuals. So it was really Croatian that split away, first ideologically and then actually from the former Serbo-Croatian but it was still

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called Serbo-Croatian. The time was not right for simply calling it Croatian or the Croatian language. So this was a kind of compromise, not a very successful one, but anyhow it was an intermediate step. Then as things developed further on decentralisation of the state following the 1974 constitutions, in Croatia the language gradually came to be called simply Croatian. In the first Yugoslavia, the unitary state of Yugoslavia, there was officially the so-called SerboCroatian, which was a construction if you like, and now after all these different developments with the break-up of Yugoslavia officially there is no more Serbo-Croatian: there is Serbian in Serbia and Croatian in Croatia and SerboCroatian and Bosnian in the various parts of Bosnia. I would like to stress the symbolic effect of all this. Of course people care for their language, and the name is also very important. If a new state is being defined which is still part of a territory that used to be defined differently, one of the first things the state needs is an official language as an important national symbol, which it does not share with anyone else. Brigitta Busch (University of Vienna): We are talking here about naming, but I was thinking when our speakers were giving their papers earlier that language continua are not the exception to the rule in most countries. However, in politics this notion of continua disappears completely and in linguistics we seem to have accepted this also to a certain extent. Concepts of culture seem very stable and settled, when possibly the basis in linguistics only goes back to the time of the nation state. However, in cultural studies there is this debate about looking at culture differently and it has become so popular that it has now possibly become the mainstream. So, if we do not look at culture any more as something closed, I was wondering whether in linguistics we could think also about language differently, maybe think about language in a more open manner rather than this view of a coherent and closed system. I was also thinking (I might be wrong) that the Serbo-Croatian language was a kind of soft standardisation. I do not know if we can describe it like this, but given the multiplicity of codes and different varieties and so on, this seems to me to be the best description of it. So, could this possibly be a model for other situations of language continua, or is it bound to fail? Dubravko S˘kiljan (Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Ljubljana): I think that behind Kanita’s question is the issue of whether names create languages or not, and I think that the answer is, as always in linguistics, yes and no. It is obvious that languages could exist without names or with more than one, with many different names. But, ethnically, language is part of some translinguistic territory, concluding with other idioms with names in such a case that language has to have a name. This name is not given by speakers; it is instead always some group, some élite, that gives the name and this giving of the name is almost always an agreement of political objectives. However, this name has to be accepted, not only by the members of this linguistic community – the members who are presented as being the members of this community – but also by the others, as we can see in the case of Bosnian. The name Bosnian is not at the moment completely accepted, not accepted at all by Serbs and Croatians, so it is very difficult to say that Bosnian is a language. Kanita Kovacevic (Kulturkontakt, Vienna): But do you think the problem with the Bosnian language is the fact that only Bosnians say ‘I speak Bosnian’?

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Is this problem perhaps produced by some linguist who misused the name of the Bosnian language by infiltrating it with some old Turkish names? Dubravko S˘kiljan (Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Ljubljana): No, when you see that there is some kind of separated linguistic community within the dominant linguistic community with their own idiom then they have a right to give a name to what they want. Whether or not it gets to be accepted by others is a question of relations of power and authority and so on. Helen Kelly-Holmes (University of Limerick): But, if we take this to its logical conclusion, then because everyone’s idiom is slightly different, we can keep defining down until we have borders within borders, and we can put a border around a very small linguistic community. Where do languages and dialects stop, or is it as Brigitta said that we have to start thinking about them differently? Because if we all keep putting boarders around smaller and smaller linguistic groups we will end up with multiplicity of languages, sometimes for defensive purposes. Dubravko S˘kiljan (Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Ljubljana): I agree with the conclusion, but, as I noted, linguists do not have any real answer to this question. An idiom could, from one position, be viewed as a dialect, and from another it could be viewed as a sociolect, set from another as a language. It is connected with this question about the role of linguists, who, even if they sometimes seem not to be, are still human beings and citizens! They are participants in the ideological context of society. I think it is very useful to separate linguists and linguistics. We have to be aware of the fact that linguistics always has some kind of ideological role; it is not only operational but it also has some kind of ideological dimension to it, and so I think that the only possible starting point is to accept that this is so and, if possible, to be autocritical about the fact. I am not sure that linguists and linguistics have the authority to actually change things in society. I think they can convey the facts and describe a particular situation, but they do not have the authority to gain social agreement. A linguist who does have authority is probably also a politician. Ranko Bugarski (University of Belgrade): With regard to this issue of names and naming, there is this uncertainty as to whether the language should properly be called ‘Bosnian’ or ‘Bosniak’, and that is in a sense I suppose a serious problem because both names have their implications and the implications are different and they are political or politicised. ‘Bosnian’ was chosen during the war in the early 1990s by the political and cultural elites in what is now the Federation part of Bosnia and Serbia. The name Bosnian was chosen first I suppose because it had a certain tradition to it; it had been used in the Austro-Hungarian period, but perhaps more importantly it was selected because the people insisted on calling the language a new language, as potentially the language of all the citizens of Bosnia who are either ‘Bosniaks’ (formally Muslims), Bosnians or Croats. The political implication is that this would be the language of the state, giving a territorial designation, as against an ethnic designation, to Bosnia. So there is always this tension between the territorial principle and the ethnic principle. If the language is called Bosniak it will be assumed that it is only for Bosniaks, i.e. Muslims, and Bosnian-Serbs will speak Bosnian and Croatians will speak Croatian, which is the case in fact. An added complication is the fact that the language officially called Bosnian is

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being codified as if it were meant only for the Bosniaks because the codification stresses the oriental heritage, which in part relates to all of Bosnia, but mainly it is Muslim. So what is being created is a kind of ethnically marked Bosniak or Muslim idiom, but with the idea that it should be the language of the whole state, and of course the Serbs and the Croats in Bosnia protest and will not accept it. Croatian élites of linguists, politicians and so on will say the language should not be called Bosnian, but that it should be called Bosniak. Now the question is, who is to decide on these things? During the war the name Bosniak was suggested and accepted by the population, there is no doubt about that, but in view of later developments, post-Dayton developments, and all these problems that I have mentioned, I think it still remains an open question. For a while there was some agreement, but now it seems that some think that the language should be Bosniak and others think that it should be Bosnian, and of course it will not be the linguists who will decide in the end it will be the politicians and what they will decide is anyone’s guess. Brigitta Busch (University of Vienna): While we are on the subject of names and naming, it might be worthwhile to highlight my own experience of a project concerning educational material for schools in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is interesting. The aim of the project was to create teaching material that could be used in the transition phase between primary and secondary education. Obviously we had to deal with the language issue. We took a very unusual approach in that we decided to base about 80% of the book on original texts, on language in use. So we took literary texts, older ones in SerboCroatian, newspaper texts, current ones from different papers, we took all kinds of authentic texts and so we had a really broad spectrum of texts in a diachronic dimension but also in a synchronic dimension. We put all of these texts into one single book without labelling them, so that each unit of the book ‘Pogledi’1 has this kind of large spectrum. We got acceptance from the education authorities of all the cantons in the Federation and from Republika Srpski and this textbook became the first book in which one and the same version is in use throughout the whole of Bosnia-Herzegovina. With the support of the Office of the High Representative and the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 5000 copies were printed and distributed to schools. One year after the release of ‘Pogledi’ an evaluation was carried out. The feedback was positive on the pedagogic approach as well as on the linguistic design. Teachers told us it was successful in the classroom because pupils identified with it. Ranko Bugarski (University of Belgrade): Did you use any language names? Brigitta Busch (University of Vienna): No, none. Ranko Bugarski (University of Belgrade): Well, I would say that is why it was successful. Brigitta Busch (University of Vienna): We did not use any labels. The texts were just presented and accepted as language in use, even though there are different varieties and scripts within one single book. We were not sure if it would be accepted because it is a radical break with textbook practice, which tends to be unifying and prescriptive. I suppose the ‘hardliners’ will not use it, but in fact we have a fairly good distribution throughout all of Bosnia. It is only recommended teaching material rather than obligatory, and I think it would

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have been very hard to get authorisation for it as an obligatory text. But this example leads me back to this question of whether we cannot have a kind of softer codification or standardisation. It is a daring practice to allow a large variety, but I am wondering whether we cannot rethink the idea of having a standard that is more flexible, that allows for a bigger variety. I would like to know how you feel about it. Ranko Bugarski (University of Belgrade): Well, based on what I was saying, what is left in Serbia is something approaching this kind of situation, relatively speaking. There is what you call soft standardisation in that both pronunciations and alphabets are, shall we say, still allowed in public use, even in official use, which is only a segment of public use. Brigitta Busch (University of Vienna): I would say the old Serbo-Croatian was soft standardisation also, was it not? Ranko Bugarski (University of Belgrade): It was soft at some point. Dubravko S˘kiljan (Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Ljubljana): I think that this kind of flexibility will become the norm more and more. Post-modern communication and phenomena like electronic communication allow a mutuality of different varieties and so on, standardisation will have to change and become softer. I am speaking also about official use of language in public communication and I think that language in public, the use of public language in Croatia, has changed in these last ten years. Croat politics wants to make a separate nation state and to make language a symbol of the state and a symbol that will not be acceptable for other nations inside Croatia and especially not acceptable for Serbs, so that language had to be changed to become the symbol of this new state. I think that Serbian politics at the moment has not yet invented a Serbian nation state. Ranko Bugarski (University of Belgrade): But this is because Serbia felt no need to emphasise its separate identity, this implies that it was in a way happy with its Serbo-Croatian background tradition and so on. Monika de Frantz (European University Institute, Florence): It seemed to me that the main conclusion of the first two speakers was somehow that language discourse was constructed by politics, so my question then is what is the role of linguistics in all of this? Are there no separate dynamics in language that might cause political changes? According to Dubravko, language was shown to have an important role in the political construction of nationalism, but I was not really clear on what that role is. Is the work of linguists the cause, the means? Or is this instead a consequence of political action? If it is the former, then it would be important to look at the actors in this language politics and their motivations. Dona spoke more about language having an influence on politics but did not really look at the political motivations behind, for example, the different statistics on broadcasting that she showed us. It would add to this if we could also look for example at economic and political factors. So, I would like to talk about the role of the linguist as a political figure and also about the role of linguistics as something apart from the prevailing political force. What can the subject of linguistics as a, possibly, objective science contribute to the analysis? Ranko Bugarski (University of Belgrade): Language policies should not be confused with linguistics. Linguists are not the actors if you are talking about language policy. Language policy is decided in political circles. Ideally

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linguists should be consulted at least, but most often they are not; they are simply regarded as a service, a technical team or something like that. The thinking is that the politicians take all the important decisions, and then the linguists see what they can do with these decisions. That is the way linguists are treated, if they are consulted at all. So the real actors as far as I am concerned in language policies are politicians and certain intellectual circles closest to the politicians. When it comes to operationalising or putting into practice language policy decisions, then linguists perhaps play a more important role. For example, taking care of the technical detail and standardising various idioms to produce alphabets and orthographies for previously unwritten languages and also assisting expert lawyers to take care of the language-rights issues for minorities to use their own language, and so on. So the actors are various and linguists make up only one not particularly important segment in all of this. Brigitta Busch (University of Vienna): But should linguistics as a discipline or linguists as actors take some responsibility in saying to politicians that their political decisions or their language policies may have such and such consequences in the field of education, in the field of media, in the field of cultural policies, and so on? Coming back to the question of naming or codifying languages, it is interesting – by the way this is more a personal perception than based on hard scientific evidence – that the further the process of having Croat and Serbian and Bosnian written in the respective constitutions developed, the more people started to refer to nas˘ jezik, to ‘our language’, not just internally, but outside of former Yugoslavia also, for example, here in Austria. There are many more factors to it, and I do not know, but I think possibly one role linguists could play would be to point out contradictions behind such terms. Ranko Bugarski (University of Belgrade): Yes, certainly. Except that we would not get much of a hearing unless what we had to say was politically palatable. Verena Plutzar (Integrationshaus, Vienna): I just want to add to this discussion that if someone wants to learn this language now here in Austria it is very hard to find a Bosnian dictionary and Bosnian textbooks for learners, now they are Croatian. This brings me to one of the central issues that I am concerned about, namely the status of this language as a foreign language, and this seems to be a question of cultural language politics too. Elfie Fleck (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Kultur, Vienna): This is an important point. For example, Langenscheidt published a dictionary of German-Croatian and Croatian-German, but I compared it with an earlier version, which was still called Serbio-Croatian, and I looked up a few ambiguous terms, and I found no difference whatsoever. The content was exactly the same, and all that had changed was the label. Verena Plutzar (Integrationshaus, Vienna): One time I was in Croatia we were discussing languages and idioms and I asked what the word for ‘tomatoes’ would be and the people I was talking to came up with eight different words. But, in my dictionary, I found just one. Helen Kelly-Holmes (University of Limerick): Coming back to this idea of linguists as actors, it is important to ask how a publisher can make the decision to choose just that particular word.

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Verena Plutzar (Integrationshaus, Vienna): These kinds of decisions are being made all the time. For instance, if you look for a language course in Vienna, you will find Croatian courses, but not Serbo-Croatian courses. And, on the other hand, you cannot find a Croatian-French dictionary. So, people are making these decisions. Ranko Bugarski (University of Belgrade): This is because Serbo-Croatian is no longer officially an accepted name for the language. It had to be called something else and that sort of decision, I guess again, is politically based from the point of view of the country where the publishing house is based. So they have to call it Serbian or Croatian or Bosnian; for political or perhaps cultural reasons they decide to call it Croatian and then do nothing more about it. Kanita Kovacevic (KulturKontakt, Vienna): If we take the example of Bosnian, publishers just changed the labels on books. They replaced the SerboCroatian label with Bosnian, but in substance, the grammar is the same. It is just a label. Dona Kolar-Panov (University of Skopje): On the question of codification, although Macedonian, one of the languages of former Yugoslavia, was codified and was accepted by the wider linguistic community and the international community, and has entered the list of the recognised languages in the world, there are two neighbours of Macedonia who still dispute the existence of the national language – namely Greece and Bulgaria. There is a constant denial by some Bulgarian politicians, backed up by scholarship in the country, of the existence of the Macedonian language, and this has a long continuity. Certain points are modified from time to time but its main argument, that the Macedonian language has no foundation in history, remains the same. The whole machinery of intellectuals – linguists, historians, literary critics – is engaged in this negation of the Macedonian language. There is a faction of scholars who are fabricating new evidence against the status of the Macedonian language, mainly advocating the standpoint that Macedonian is a dialect of Bulgarian. This is, I think, a good example of the relation between politics and linguistics.

Language Planning and Language Change Helen Kelly-Holmes (University of Limerick): I was wondering how these issues of codification and standardisation have affected people’s everyday communication. Is it almost a diglossic situation, where the powerful people have codified the language in a certain way for official/public use, but ordinary people still speak in their own way? Or has there been not only language change at the official level but also language change in everyday terms? Ranko Bugarski (University of Belgrade): I think what we are getting to here is the whole question of language change and what happens beyond name changes. In this respect, I want to talk about Serbo-Croatian because this is where the actual changes have occurred. Now, officially, and I stress ‘officially’ because I believe Serbo-Croatian still exists on some levels, but officially, administratively, there is no more Serbo-Croatian. There is Serbian in Serbia, Croatian in Croatia, and there are Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian in the different parts in Bosnia. There was a Serbian standard and there was a Croatian one, so they have to assume a tradition and history behind them as

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separate entities although they were at some point joined together into SerboCroatian. Bosnian does not have this kind of background, this kind of tradition; it is only recently being carved out of Serbo-Croatian. These then are the four relatives shall we say, potentially with Montenegrin, which neither has a separate linguistic programme nor is it officially recognised under that name but it is another possibility at the moment. Now, what has actually changed? Well, the official names have changed in these three cases. Have the languages themselves changed? And, if so, in what way and to what extent? Generally speaking, if we talk about everyday, particularly spoken communication, ordinary people speaking, then very little has changed. We know that languages change over time, all the time, bit by bit. What have changed in different ways and for different reasons in the three cases (Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian), are the official registers, terminologies, the speech of administrators and politicians, especially those in high-ranking positions. In the case of Croatia, where Croatian, having been proclaimed as separate and distinct from Serbian and having more or less nothing to do with the former Serbo-Croatian, obviously had to be changed more. Where it resisted spontaneous change, there were interventions – semi-official not necessarily introduced by the state, in fact in most cases not explicitly introduced by the state, rather, shall we say, toyed with by the state – so that from these official registers some words, some markers, mythological markers, derived words and so on, particularly certain neologisms and certain other words, entered into some areas of life. And, in this way, changes in official language have spread a bit into the ordinary language. Brigitta Busch (University of Vienna): Surely, though, it was the case that this was simply tolerated and/or promoted by the state. So who were the main actors? Ranko Bugarski (University of Belgrade): It would be fair to say that the main actors were part of the intellectual and political elite, including the most influential Croatian linguists, I think. They, in some way, opened the gates to this and declared that Serbian and Croatian are separate languages, and so on. Then the scene was occupied by a second level of linguists, cultivators, journalists and so on who took these things to extremes and started inventing words replacing so-called Serbianisms or internationalisms, introducing whole new terminologies in the true native Croatian tradition and much of this tradition was invented of course. Croatian was steered so as to move away from its Serbo-Croatian heritage. There have been some interventions in Bosnian in terms of a new orthography, new dictionaries, grammars and so on, but Bosnian had to be made to look different enough from both Serbian and Croatian and this was a very difficult task, because linguistically of course or in strict linguistic terms, this is all one language. I do not think there is any doubt about that, although not everyone will admit it. So, in order for Bosnian to be different, at least recognisably different from Serbian and Croatian, what were the options? Well, there was really only one way: by accessing the oriental heritage – Islamic, Turkish, Arabic, Persian – which all of course in many cases have a certain tradition in the language used in Bosnia and indeed in SerboCroatian, but, basically, most of this was really relevant to the Muslim or Bosniak population. So Bosnian, if it is moving anywhere, is moving in a

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different direction and acquiring a separate linguistic profile, but only to a certain extent. Similar things are happening in the minds of the engineers of the new Montenegrin language. We might wonder why nothing much has happened in Serbia since Serbian became officially a separate language, distinct from these others. Well, there is a name change and the names of the institutions have changed in that the term ‘Serbo-Croatian’ in the titles of institutes, etc. has been changed to Serbian, but these are external changes. Internally, nothing has happened, and my explanation for this, to put it in quite simple terms and without going into detail, is that Serbia, whatever else it did or did not do, did not secede from the Yugoslav Federation; it was the others that seceded. First, of course Slovenia, then Croatia, then Bosnia, and the one that secedes finds it necessary to reaffirm its separate identity. Serbia did not move anywhere and Serbian did not move anywhere; Serbian did not have to prove it was different, nor did it wish to affirm its separate identity. In other words there were no official interventions in the language apart from these external things like changing the official name. There is no serious linguistic engineering going on in Serbian. There are a few people who have suggested rather drastic measures concerning the alphabet and pronunciation and other things, such as for instance introducing some letters from some old alphabet because they think Serbian must also look different from Croatian – simply because Croatian wants to look different from Serbian. But these are not serious linguists, just individual nationalists, so I discount that there were any organised measures taken by the state or by any relevant institutions. What has happened has been purely individual, and not really worthy of serious discussion. Aida Tanjic (University of Vienna): But is it not also the case that because Serbian was the dominant language in the former Yugoslavia there was not any necessity to change the language? Ranko Bugarski (University of Belgrade): That depends on how you interpret the term or the notion ‘Serbian’ in the Federation. Serbian is officially a variant of Serbo-Croatian. If, however, you want to look at things linguistically, there is a sense in which you might say that Serbian has retained most of the features of the former Serbo-Croatian. Only Serbian, for example, has retained the two dualities that I mentioned in my paper, which you do not get in Croatian, nor really in Bosnian either, since there are no Ekavian speakers in Bosnian, as far as I know. Some people use the Cyrillic alphabet but mainly it is the Latin now. To an extent, Serbian is still closest to the former SerboCroatian language, linguistically speaking.

Language Rights and Wrongs Brigitta Busch (University of Vienna): We have to distinguish between rights guaranteed in constitutions and their implementation. On paper the present Macedonian constitution goes relatively far in language rights, so does the South African constitution, for instance. But the problem is, how does this translate into practice, and what does it mean in practical terms? Status on paper can be quite different from status in daily life. In Austria, for instance, the constitution since 1955 guarantees rights for Slovenian speakers and Croatian speakers, but these rights have only partly been put into practice.

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Another problem is that constitutions and laws grant rights to particular groups and do not include provisions for intercultural dialogue. Monika de Frantz (European University Institute, Florence): I was thinking about how language has of course an important role to play in cultural recognition, but is language recognition not also about a political right to speech? Dona Kolar-Panov (University of Skopje): If we take Macedonia as an example, there was already recognition of the cultural rights of the Albanian population. But even though they had political rights as well, they did not seem to think that the political rights were enough for recognition as a separate political entity within Macedonia. So the language has been used as a vehicle for asking for those political rights. So, in this way, language rights became political. Monika de Frantz (European University Institute, Florence): But does the concept of the nation have to be linked to language in Macedonia? Would it not be possible to link it instead to a shared constitution, and in this shared constitution there is a right to free expression of speech? How far is it really possible just to accept Albanians speaking Albanian in Macedonia, but still being part of the nation, the constitutional nation? Dona Kolar-Panov (University of Skopje): Well, this was the case even before the agreement in 2001, when the Albanian language was granted the status of almost the second official language of Macedonia. There were political, linguistic and cultural rights written into the Macedonian constitution for the Albanian minority. What the Albanian minority was asking for was to nominate the Albanian language as a second official language of Macedonia. This was partly granted in that the constitution says Albanian is an official language in every area of Macedonia, because 20 % of the population is speaking Albanian, which, when we come down to the level of implementation of that clause in the constitution, puts the ball very much into another court, namely that of the local self-government. This means that the local selfgovernments have the right to determine whether a language is going to be an official language in an area or not, according to the number of Albanians living there. So, in terms of language rights and political rights, there is consensus by most of the international community that Macedonia has the greatest recognition of minority rights of almost all the Yugoslav successor states, and, indeed, compared with many other countries in the world as well. Brigitta Busch (University of Vienna): This is a difficult question, because what was striking in former Yugoslavia in the 1980s for instance was the fact that there were school manuals in Romany, and former Yugoslavia was one of the first countries, if not the first country, where such things existed. From the point of view of multilingualism, I suppose, for me, at the time, it was a shining example, compared to other countries. It is nice to have something in the constitution but it can be buried there for ages. We have got the not-so-shining example of Austria, where in the constitution we have got minority rights for Slovenian speakers and Croatian speakers and so on, and the rights have been there for ages, but when do they become reality? If I were to draft a constitution I would want to see something in there that obliges some kind of intercultural communication, that would somehow oblige people to learn other

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languages or to create some kind of interfaces, because constitutions, to a large extent, result in rights for this group and that group and so on, but there is not really any interactional or intercultural dimension to this. Ranko Bugarski (University of Belgrade): This is the difference between rights and opportunities. There are all sorts of rights written into constitutions and laws, but then there are very few mechanisms provided to insure implementation of these. So individuals or groups are granted rights to education, media and other things, but opportunities to actually exercise these can hardly be written into constitutions, and that is the difference between, as they say, law in books and law in real life. So, are you saying that states should be obliged to provide certain services, to go beyond simply allowing people to exercise rights? Brigitta Busch (University of Vienna): Yes I am talking about that, and I would like to see some provision somewhere for intercultural dialogue and interaction. Dubravko S˘kiljan (Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Ljubljana): I have to add one more dimension to this discussion, because you spoke about free expression of speech as a guarantee of the possibility to express human rights. Free expression of speech is of course a general human right, but it is at one and the same time so easy and so difficult to interpret. Language rights as they are considered nowadays in Europe are collective rights, and so one has to be a member of an ethnic group which has a right to use the language, and it is some kind of paradox, because, for example, what about a Vietnamese speaker here in Vienna? Has he/she some linguistic rights? Well, no, probably not, because of the fact that linguistic practice is almost always in Europe connected to groups. You have to be expressly a member of some kind of ethnic group, and this is the only way to realise your linguistic rights. If you do not want to be a member of an ethnic group you do not have any linguistic rights. However, this does not recognise the contradictions in people’s lives. Research in Slovenia among children whose maternal language is not Slovenian, but Serbo-Croatian, Romany and so on, shows that all or almost all, more than the 95%, said that they want to be now and in the future members of the Slovenian linguistic community, because this is the way to be incorporated into society. So how do we interpret this in the context of linguistic rights? Brigitta Busch (University of Vienna): I think that the problem here is, as you pointed out, that you have to choose a community that you want to be part of, and it seems that this is still very exclusive. It is an either/or choice. You cannot say that you feel part of both, and sometimes you cannot even choose, because you are already ascribed to a particular group. This is one of the crucial problems, and so we need somehow to think about it differently, because these multiple affiliations are a reality for many people. This question of language and identity is very often taken as a given, and I think we need to rethink this. I was recently at a debate about minorities in London, and it was really striking for me how it was somehow taken for granted that languages bestow a particular identity. Helen Kelly-Holmes (University of Limerick): But the idea of multiple identities does not suit those involved in state-building, because they want to force people to ascribe to a certain identity. This suits their purpose.

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Brigitta Busch (University of Vienna): Yes, of course, this identity must be exclusive, and this is the prevailing ideology in present-day European politics, not only from a Yugoslavian point of view: we only need to think about the debate in Germany about dual citizenship or about the debate on the Integration Treaty in Austria. These things start off innocently enough: first of all, it is about learning the state language so as to ensure communication and the functioning of the state and so on, but it is not as innocent as it might seem, because it comes from an ideological package of state language and of state culture. Tatiana Zhurzhenko (Kharkiv National University, Ukraine): The situation with the Russian-speaking community in Ukraine is a good example of this. For many years now there has been a debate about the status of the Russian-speaking community, which is complicated by the fact that Russian and Ukrainian are very close languages. There was also an intensive process of assimilation and inter-marriages and intensive migration, so especially in Eastern and Central Ukraine the relationship is very mixed up. What is going on now is a kind of attempt to reconstruct ethnicity, but if you look at the numbers, at what language people use in everyday communication, it is actually Ukrainian speakers who are the linguistic minority, not the Russianspeakers. Most of the people who speak Russian in the Ukraine identify themselves as Ukrainians, but Russian-speaking Ukrainians. It is this kind of double-identity that is part of people’s everyday reality, but the whole discourse is about forcing these people to choose between two identities and the implication is that if they see themselves as Ukrainians, they should come back to their original language. Dubravko S˘kiljan (Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Ljubljana): Why? Why is it so important to speak Ukrainian to be Ukrainian, to speak Croatian to be Croatian? There are surely other means of expressing collective identity. Why is there this ideological pressure for a language to be the most important symbol of a nation? Ranko Bugarski (University of Belgrade): That is a strictly European idea, present in Europe and Europeanised countries. Otherwise we do not find this kind of thing elsewhere in the world. Tatiana Zhurzhenko (Kharkiv National University, Ukraine): It is interesting that you mention this as a particularly European phenomenon, because in Ukraine currently these multiple identities are seen as a main obstacle for national development, and national development is also seen as moving towards the EU and away from Russia. The question is: what should be done about these people who are neither completely Russian nor Ukrainian? If they would describe themselves simply as Russian, they would be considered a Russian ethnic minority, and it would not be a problem to grant them some minority rights, but they do not want to be a minority, they claim that they are also part of the Ukrainian nation and this of course depends on how the history is interpreted. Are these people victims who have been forced to accept Russian-speaking culture or have they accepted this of their own accord? And this brings us back to history and what was the meaning of such a history? Should we completely deny it and start from zero or should we acknowledge the fact of Soviet history and the associated identities? This brings me to

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another issue: I was impressed by one of the examples Ranko Bugarski gave in his paper about Serbs coming to central Vojvodina, who speak different dialects and so are being alienated on the basis of these dialects. It reminded me of something I heard from one of my Russian colleagues, who did research on Russian migrants coming from former Soviet republics in central Asia. They moved mainly to central Russia and were faced with the same problems there; in other words, they were completely excluded by local communities despite the fact that they also spoke Russian and culturally they should be the same. So, for me, a very interesting question to discuss is when do differences create the otherness, and when do they not? What kind of differences do they create, and what degree of otherness is formed? Sometimes it is only a small bit of difference, like an accent or a dialect item, but it creates complete alienation. When does it happen, and why, this construction and degree of otherness? Ranko Bugarski (University of Belgrade): This is a new phenomenon, these new minorities or displaced speakers of dialects, and this is also relevant to the question of language and territory where you have a development, probably unique in in Europe: whole dialects have been lifted, so to speak, and transplanted into another environment by the movement of refugees and migrants. In linguistic terms, these dialects have also changed, since some Serbian dialects especially in Kosovo are simply no longer there and their speakers have been dispersed all over the place. We are talking now about Serbia because most of the Serbs from Croatia and Bosnia ended up in Serbia and also those who crossed the border moving north into central Bosnia. Many of these, in fact all of them, are Ekavian speakers. This distinguishing mark is often taken by the unwilling hosts as somehow an indication of an alien body: they feel that these people do not speak like they do, that they are different, and of course the hosts were and still are under pressure dealing with all sorts of problems both during the war and since the war ended and so on, and so obviously these refugees do not get a very warm reception. In the minds of ordinary people this dialectal difference serves as a kind of mark of difference, of otherness, even though these people are Serbs. Verena Plutzar (Integrationshaus, Vienna): I have dealt with many Croatian refugees, who have a whole range of dialects, and I found that because of this they were separated and isolated and they do not have the same opportunities as ‘domestic’ Croats. I wonder whether there are any language policies in Croatia and Serbia and other countries that deal with these problems. Ranko Bugarski (University of Belgrade): There is no language policy in Serbia on this issue, the whole problem has hardly been recognised or even brought to public attention. Monika de Frank (European University Institute, Florence): I was just thinking when we mentioned individual and collective rights earlier that in fact it is mostly necessary to find a collective, say for interest representation, or at least some economic collective in order to be able to really present an individual’s speech in public places. Dubravko S˘kiljan (Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis Ljubljana): In our country it goes even further and it is also a question of legal organisation. In Croatia there is a closed list of ethnic affiliations, in the census, for example,

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from which I can choose and I have to say ‘I am a Croat’ or ‘I am a Serb’ or a Romany or an Italian. I have tried to say nothing, to refuse to ascribe to a particular identity, but it is very difficult, impossible really, I was told. And so, from the numeric detail on my passport, you can tell that I am ethnically a Croat. It is not written down explicitly, but the numbering indicates it. Ranko Bugarski (University of Belgrade): In Serbia you can withhold this information, but then you are counted as undeclared. Aida Tanjic (University of Vienna): It was possible in 1991. Dubravko S˘kiljan (Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis Ljubljana): In 1991, 1992, maybe. But today’s situation is a little bit different. Verena Plutzar (Integrationshaus, Vienna): This reminds me of the discussion among third-generation migrants here. They hate the question ‘Do you feel Austrian or Turkish?’ In fact, they often refuse to answer. Instead they say, ‘I am something else’. Their point is that there is something in between. It is something new, something special, something that challenges the nation. Ranko Bugarski (University of Belgrade): How is this new thing named? Verena Plutzar (Integrationshaus, Vienna): Third-generation culture or second-generation culture, something like that. Briggita Busch (University of Vienna): What is interesting is that it also goes together with a special code, its own language or variety. Elfie Fleck (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Kultur, Vienna): I am trying to think of the latest census that we had in Austria, and, as far as I can remember, we did not have an ethnic category. Instead we had to state the citizenship of the passport and I suppose this is an objective criterion, even though some people have two passports. But we also had to fill in a linguistic category, and interestingly it did not say mother tongue, instead it said ‘Umgangssprache’ or vernacular tongue. In other words, the language people use in their daily life. I cannot remember whether it was possible to list more than one – I wanted to mention four languages – and I was wondering how they actually dealt with multiple answers. I am sure I was not the only person with more than one language in my daily life, so how do they deal, for example, with people putting down Vietnamese or German? Is this also legitimate? And I wonder if and how they actually count it.

Transnational Media,Language and Borders Brigitta Busch (University of Vienna): I would like to take a few minutes to talk about policies of transnational broadcasters concerning South-eastern Europe, because I think that this issue is very relevant and it has not been talked about very much. When I use the term ‘transnational’, I am mainly talking about news channels and stations like the BBC World Service, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio France Internationale, and Deutsche Welle. Local, private broadcasters in South-eastern Europe rely for news programmes to a very large extent on programmes provided by transnational broadcasters. The fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the blocs logic caused a crisis for the transnational broadcasters. They lost their raison d’étre, which had been to broadcast the Western point of view behind the Iron Curtain. Then in the early 1990s, with the political changes that occurred, they had to redefine their positions and what they went in for was rebroadcasting via satellite on local FM

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frequencies. Local broadcasters that had mushroomed with media privatisation in the transition phase took up the offer eagerly. To produce international or national news programmes is very cost-intensive and out of the reach of most of the local producers, whereas rebroadcasting is free of charge, the necessary equipment for downlinking the programme from the satellite as well as the daily programme supply. The number of languages in which transnational broadcasters produce programmes is impressive. Within the BBC and Voice of America almost all the major languages of South-eastern Europe are represented. Concerning Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, the language policy of the transnational broadcasters was to split their services into separate services for each country, each language. In the case of the Albanian-language programmes the policy is different, as it is organised according to the logic of linguistic space. For example, within the BBC World Service the Albanian programme is compiled in one single news room and broadcast through one single channel. Some of the programmes are slightly more oriented for an Albanian, a Kosovan or a Macedonian audience, but basically they are produced for the whole linguistic space. This means that a space of identification is being created which is beyond the national space. By the way this also encompasses the Diaspora to some extent as the programmes are available via the Internet, via audio files and text files that can be downloaded. I think that it is relevant to our debate in the sense that there is an intervention from outside not only on the level of discourse, but also on the level of language. I was wondering what you thought about this development? Dona Kolar-Panov (University of Skopje): First we have to distinguish between two types of transnational broadcasting. On the one hand, there is this group of dominant news services, like the ones you mentioned, that are all intentionally made to be to a certain extent objective on the political and social cultural situations in the country and, on the other, there is transnational broadcasting that happens by tuning in to channels that are coming from the ‘origin’ of the language, basically local or national channels that are broadcast and received elsewhere. Even though the people who are working in the transnational services, like the World Service, come from those countries, a lot of the time the views in those programmes are not the views of those in countries like Kosovo or Albania or of Macedonian Albanians, but of the British government, for example. So that is one side to it: we have the views of the governments outside the situation, of the international community bringing in everyday news of the political and sociocultural life of that linguistic area. This is the type of transnational broadcasting you were talking about. It is not necessarily bad, and it is not necessarily good either. It is a way of being able to compare information between transnational broadcasters, because most of the people who listen to those stations also listen to local broadcasting. During the conflict between Macedonia and Albania, local people in Macedonia tuned in to transnational channels as well, because they were one of the most reliable sources of information on the conflict in their own country, since both Albanian and Macedonian stations were biased either way in their reporting. This is on the political level. But on the level of the creation of linguistic spaces, both types of transnational broadcasting are equally important because they address linguistic communities, rather than communities that are defined by

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national borders or any artificial borders that are created. As I said earlier in my paper this phenomenon is not only happening with the communities that are linguistic communities but with other communities too, and also this transnational broadcasting is a way of uniting the Diaspora of certain countries. For example, the Macedonian television channel used satellite to be able to rebroadcast to its diasporic audience. This channel is not received in Macedonia and so far it is only received in Australia through a cable television network over there. Helen Kelly-Holmes (University of Limerick): So, as with the case of a multiplicity of languages, a multiplicity of channels also threatens the nation state. The public broadcaster or the state broadcaster cannot be relied upon to create a coherent identity. Dona Kolar-Panov (University of Skopje): Even though the nation states still think that they can reinforce the nation through the national or public broadcasters and there is still a large influence, but the influences that are made possible by the new technologies through the Internet are such that it is a lost battle. Brigitta Busch (University of Vienna): I think that is because life is still, as you said, very much organised in the framework of the nation state. It is still governed by the fact that people possess a certain passport; it is still very much governed by certain laws and regulations within a nation state; and it is very much organised on a local level in terms of access to education, health and social care and so on. So I suppose that the public service in this sense has to fulfil some function because it has to provide access to this kind of information for daily life at least. That is probably also a reason why national broadcasters are not withering away completely. Something that struck me when I was listening to Dona’s paper was the issue of subtitling. I agree that subtitling is a very good means of integrating audiences, but a question occurred to me. Why only subtitle Albanian programmes into Macedonian and not also the other way round, or would this not be possible? Dona Kolar-Panov (University of Skopje): I agree, but most of the Macedonians in Macedonia would not agree, because they still consider themselves a majority and Albanian the minority language. The best thing would be if Macedonians would learn Albanian and Albanians learn Macedonian – that would be the best solution. We could have the same situation as happened in Canada with their language policy. I think Canada was a very interesting situation. with the multilingual cultural channel introduced in 1974 when I lived there. It was introduced neither on a commercial channel nor on a state channel, but on a cable television channel, so that if people wanted to watch the multilingual channel they had to pay for it and so it was not such a great success. Unlike the one in Australia, that was a state-sponsored project and part of the larger, multicultural policy in the country at the time. Monika de Frantz (European University Institute, Florence): You described the transnational media, as I understood it, as a democratic balance against local television channels, which is a really interesting point. You also mentioned the Soros Foundation in your paper as an important private transnational funder of private media. Would you also describe these Sorosfunded media as a good democratic check?

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Dona Kolar-Panov (University of Skopje): Soros partly took over the role of the state during the transition of Macedonian media by providing funding for what are called independent media, but I think these are actually commercial media. What he has done is to make it possible for people to set up independent media outlets by buying them equipment and sending them to work, because that number of commercial media cannot possibly exist and survive in the market, especially in a small market, in what is one of the poorest countries in Europe. So what Soros did was to help the media; he especially helped minority-language media and had the policy of helping them establish and run their own media outlets. The media owners did not have to go to a state bank or a private bank to borrow money. They did not have to borrow money to get the media outlet up and running because they had funding from the Soros organisation instead. That funding is going to dry up and the situation must change. It will have to change because the number of media outlets that exists in Macedonia now, both mainstream and minority, cannot exist in a competitive market. Monika de Frantz (European University Institute, Florence): So in how far is it commercial? Dona Kolar-Panov (University of Skopje): My own research shows that 90% to 95% of the media outlets would have to close after the funding from Soros dries up, because they are not commercially viable. But my research is speculative at this moment because nobody wants to disclose financial records. Helen Kelly-Holmes (University of Limerick): Why is there this multiplicity of stations, why are there so many? Dona Kolar-Panov (University of Skopje): I do not really know the reason. Ukraine for example has far more television and radio stations, because it is a larger country, of course. But they also had this explosion of independent media as a means of gaining freedom of speech and a means of launching full speed into commercialism, and most of the people who established independent media there have qualifications to run those stations. In contrast, I can give you an example of one commercial Macedonian station that I visited in 1997, as part of a larger research project. The station was based in a twobedroom house: one bedroom was a studio and the man had to make up the bed so that he could show me the studio! So this kind of channel cannot exist in a competitive market, and it will have to change because the market is going to change. But I have been saying for the last five years that the market is going to change, and so far nothing is happening except that more media are applying for licences for broadcasting. So I am as puzzled as you are about the reason. Note 1. The material is also available on the internet: http://www.kulturkontakt.or.at/pogledi.

Chapter 6

Language, Ethnicity and Cultural Boundaries in Ukraine: A Response to the Papers and Debate Tatiana Zhurzhenko Kharkiv National University, Ukraine and Institute of Eastern European History, University of Vienna, Austria It is very possible that the comparison between ‘Project Ukraine’ and ‘Project Yugoslavia’ will seem to some incorrect, both academically and politically. Contrary to Yugoslavia, federalism as a model for the Ukrainian state was never seriously considered and discussed; the idea of a centralist state dominated the national liberation movement through the decades and was eventually fulfilled in 1991. Besides, as a Ukrainian scholar specialised in Ukrainian Studies, I am supposed to believe in the genuine origins, historical continuity and the future of ‘Project Ukraine’; from the teleological nationalist point of view it cannot share the fate of such ‘artificial’, supranational constructions as Yugoslavia or the USSR. At the same time, the papers in this volume reminded me of an obvious thing: the mainstream history of the successful (or failed) nation-building project is always only one of the potential narratives, which could be written under different circumstances. If Ukraine as a state disintegrates in the near future (and the question of the territorial unity of Ukraine has been on the political agenda since the birth of the independent Ukrainian state in 1991), I can easily imagine two (or probably more?) different histories telling us about the different origins, national destiny and identity of Galicia, Donbas, or Transcarpathia. No doubt, significant regional differences in the real status and functioning of the Ukrainian language (as well as the actual predominance of Russian in the East and South) would be also institutionalised.

Project ‘Ukraine’ and Project ‘Yugoslavia’ Compared If we look at the Ukrainian case through the Yugoslav lens, there were some similarities in the historical preconditions for both ‘national projects’. Towards the end of the 19th century there were significant religious, cultural and linguistic differences between the Ukrainian lands. The Ukrainian ‘ethnographic territory’ was divided between the Russian Empire and the Habsburg monarchy (where Ukrainians in Galicia were under the political and cultural domination of the Poles); Transcarpathia belonged to Hungary. In Western Ukraine (in Galicia in particular) the Roman Catholic faith formed the core of national identity, while Eastern and Central Ukraine was Orthodox. True, the population of ‘imagined Ukraine’ was not so ethnically diverse as in the Balkans. In the West, there were clear ethnic differences among Ukrainians

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themselves (polischuki, lemko, boiko), but this was not the case in Eastern and Southern Ukraine, colonised since the 18th century. Other ethnic minorities were not considered ‘autochthonous’; most of them appeared in Ukraine owing to the colonisation of these lands by the Russian state. Like Balkan peoples, Ukrainians had long-term historical contacts with the Ottoman Empire; today there is also a Tatar Muslim minority in Crimea (which is often considered by some politicians as a potential source of ethnic conflict, especially since the Kosovo war). The process of the formation of standard language stimulated by the growing resistance to the Russian and Polish linguistic assimilation started relatively late, and it was complicated by the political division of Ukrainian territory, different legal conditions and mutual isolation. Linguists pointed out the conflict between two processes of literary language-creation in Western Ukrainian and Eastern Ukrainian lands. Although the dominant view from both sides was that only one all-Ukrainian literary language should exist, based on Central Ukrainian (Poltava-Kiev dialects), significant differences between Western and Central Ukrainian versions remained. Moreover, owing to incomplete standardisation, administrative restrictions (which were especially tough in Russia) and lack of education in Ukrainian, the written and spoken language of the intelligentsia was heavily influenced by local dialects. At the beginning of the 20th century, some intellectuals warned about the danger of developing two parallel Ukrainian languages, or even two Ukrainian nationalities on one ethnographic base, like Serbs and Croats.1 The East–West division of Ukrainian lands was dramatically reinforced in the inter-war period, when the cultural contacts between the ‘two Ukraines’ were almost completely interrupted. After the years of revolution, which were marked by intensive communication and mutual influence, the development of the Ukrainian language went on again under very different political circumstances on both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’. In Soviet Ukraine, the relatively liberal communist regime of the 1920s made possible a ‘national revival’ followed by intensive work by linguists on standardisation of the Ukrainian language and delimitation from Russian: so-called Russisms were often replaced with neologisms, constructed on the basis of folk dialects. But with the changes in the political climate at the end of the 1920s, the ‘linguistic border’ with Russian was softened again, often by means of direct political intervention, and this tendency found ideological ground in the pan-Slavic aspirations of late Stalinism. Nevertheless, the East–West division of Ukrainian lands remained historical and cultural rather than linguistic. During World War II, Ukrainians (and their hopes for national liberation) became hostages to the Soviet Union’s struggle with fascist Germany, and, like Serbs and Croats, had to fight against each other. But contrary to the Yugoslav case, this tragic experience did not reproduce ethnic/linguistic cleavages; rather it strengthened cultural and ideological ones. After the incorporation of Western Ukraine into Soviet Ukraine, the old boundaries were relatively softened due to the intensive processes of administrative unification, standardisation of the educational system, urbanisation, and migration of specialists and the labour force. Some of these policies of the state were violent and far from democratic, but one cannot deny that the

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ideal of united (Soborna) Ukraine was fulfilled under Soviet rule. Whether the Ukrainian SSR was a stage in the ‘prenatal’ development of the nation, or rather an unlucky victim of the communist ‘abortion’, contemporary Ukraine unavoidably bears some features of its Soviet past.

Old Boundaries into New Contrary to the Yugoslav case, which seems at the moment to be a closed chapter, the Ukrainian story becomes especially interesting here and open to various interpretations. Can this embryonic nation of ‘the people of Soviet Ukraine’ be considered as an important stage in the process of nation building, an undeniable part of national history, with rather positive gains (elements of multicultural citizenship, some economic, political and cultural infrastructure of the modern nation)? Or is this ‘United Ukraine,’2 which the post-communist political elite got as a farewell gift from its Stalinist predecessors, a deadlock in the nation-building process and an obstacle to democratic reforms? Was socalled ‘Soviet identity’ a pure ideological construction forcefully imposed on people in the process of their denationalisation, and, if so, why it is still attractive for many of them? Should this part of the population be renationalised, reconstructed as an ethnic minority (minorities)? How dangerous are the postSoviet forms of supranational identity (pan-Slavic or Euroasian) for the future of the nation? Dramatic clashes over the interpretation of Soviet history and heritage reproduce the old historical boundaries, but this time they are also invested with some linguistic meaning. The main cultural and political boundary goes today between the ‘russified’ East and the ‘true Ukrainian’ West. The boundaries between Russian-speakers and Ukrainian-speakers are mutually constructed by political entrepreneurs who claim to represent the interests of these linguistic groups. These social constructs seem rather artificial if we remember that the overwhelming majority of the population in Ukraine understand and to some degree use both languages. What differs of course is the sphere of functioning of both languages, and this correlation depends not only on region, but also on social stratum, profession, generation, type of education (technical or humanities) and so on. Actually, what is politically constructed today as a single split inside the Ukrainian nation, is a plurality of various linguistic subcommunities, which are in permanent remaking. To leave aside the political context, people in Ukraine are normally bilingual to various degrees, and their language competence in various spheres depends on various factors. But language never exists outside of politics. In the nationalising state, the idea of congruence of language, nation and state territory becomes a factor of internal boundary-creation. Actually there are two principles of boundary-drawing, each conflicting with the other. The first one, which equalises language and ethnicity, dominates the Ukrainian political discourse. It assumes that Ukrainians who speak Russian are the victims of Russification and will enthusiastically return to their mother tongue if certain conditions are created by the state. (The education policy that draws the number of Ukrainian schools according to the degree of people who define their nationality as Ukrainian comes from this assumption.) In this approach double or multiple identity is not acceptable, and all those people with mother tongues different

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from Ukrainian have to be redefined as ethnic minorities.3 The second and more liberal approach assumes that there are ethnic Ukrainians who speak Russian as a first language, or people of other ethnic origins who consider themselves Ukrainians but speak Russian. (It is sometimes used in sociological surveys, when people are asked about their language of preference.) This second approach reflects the fact noticed by Andrew Wilson that in Ukraine ‘ethnic and linguistic boundaries are exceptionally fluid’ (p. 125). But with the ‘language issue’ remaining the focus of public debates, and being politicised in the current crisis, the linguistic boundaries are going to be reified. It is not the language itself that divides Kuchma’s regime and his political opposition; rather, the language serves as a marker to distinguish ‘true patriots’ from ‘oligarchs’. Like in all newly emerged nation states, language plays a special role in the reconstruction of ethnicity in post-Soviet Ukraine. But this role is obviously different in (re)-constructing different ethnic groups. For the ‘indigenous’ Ukrainian ethnos, having ‘special rights’ to the territory of Ukraine as a ‘core nation’, language is the first and most reliable sign of ethnicity: ‘true Ukrainians speak Ukrainian’. But not the other way around: Russian speakers are not at all automatically categorised as ethnic Russians (otherwise Ukrainians would be a minority in their nation state). Part of the Russianspeakers (many of them avoid the choice between the two ethnic identities and prefer regional or (less and less) ‘Soviet’ ones) are qualified by the power discourse as ‘Russified’ Ukrainians. This means they have to ‘become’ Ukrainians, to come up to reach their ‘true’ ethnic identity. In other words, the ‘post-imperial Russian-speaking population’ should be carefully differentiated into ethnic Russians and ‘potential’ Ukrainians. Significantly, the language is not decisive in the reconstruction of other ethnic minorities (Jews, Greeks, Koreans and others); rather, they are defined as cultural, not linguistic, communities. These minorities, which do not threaten the dominant identity of the titular nation, are an important attribute of the image of a democratic state. They are officially granted cultural and linguistic rights, even more willingly since most of them still contribute to the ‘Russian-speaking’ side. The competition for their souls still continues, as the leaders of the Russian-speaking groups often claim that they represent the interests not only of ethnic Russians, but also of Russian-speaking people of all nationalities who live in Ukraine. Crimean Tatars represent a special case, because this ethnic minority is constructed on the crossroads of various discourses. On one hand, they were a people repressed by the Stalinist regime and later rehabilitated, who finally got a chance to enjoy historical justice and come back to their lands (and the only ethnos apart from Ukrainians which is officially recognized as ‘autochthonous’). The Ukrainian state supports them with the modest resources available, although it is ‘imperial Moscow’ which is responsible for the former repressions. On the other hand, Tatars with their higher birth rates will possibly change the ‘demographic balance’ in Crimea, which is already not favourable for ethnic Ukrainians. In any case, it is their religion (and their cultural and geopolitical orientation to the Muslim world) rather than their language that makes them a culturally different, special ethnic group.

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The Problematic Russian–Ukrainian Border What makes Ukraine different from the ‘normal’ nation state is exactly the lack of clear boundaries: what is supposed to be Ukrainian (identity, language, history, geopolitical choice etc.) is hopelessly mixed with (or rather contaminated by) Russian. In the logic of ‘unfinished nation-building’ the coexistence of two cultures and languages in Ukraine is perceived not as an asset but as a weakness. ‘If the French language disappeared in France one day, the whole country would be paralysed. If Ukrainian disappears one day, people will use Russian and nobody will notice it’ – this is a popular example which illustrates the abnormality of the Ukrainian nation. It is the symbolic status of Ukrainian language and culture that seems to be the main problem here, and obviously it can be improved only at the expense of Russian. That is why the ‘Canadian option’ (formal parity of English and French) usually proposed by Russophones is not acceptable to Ukrainophones, and Russian seems to have no chance to be accepted as a second state language. ‘Linguistic equality’, which is the slogan of some Russophone groups, cannot be accepted by Ukrainophones. The existing status quo for them is a result of unjust historical circumstances: of Russian colonial expansion, administrative repressions against Ukrainian language and culture, and Soviet policies of ethnocide and even genocide. That is why this status quo cannot be accepted as a ‘zero level’ for the new democratic negotiations between two linguistic groups, and why it should even be ‘played back’ by affirmative action policy. These measures are even more needed under market conditions, which favour Russian media and mass culture. The refusal to compete with Russian culture and the quest for state protectionism is characteristic of the Ukrainian post-colonial situation. Since, from a certain point of view, Ukrainophones are indeed a linguistic minority in Ukraine, these claims are easy to understand. At the same time, these claims assume that Ukrainians as a titular nation (the ‘indigenous ethnos’ on this territory, ‘the core the people of Ukraine’) have special linguistic and cultural rights, which should be given priority. These claims are also grounded on certain historical narratives, which assume that there were Ukrainians, a Ukrainian identity and Ukrainian language before forceful Russian external interference. Moreover, according to the more recent constructions of this type, this interference cut Ukraine out of ‘Europe’, to which it naturally had belonged. This projection of popular Huntingtonian concepts into history takes an important place in the national imagination by distinguishing ‘Asiatic’ Russia from ‘European’ Ukraine. As Andrew Wilson argues, ‘The myth of Europe versus Asia places a very clear boundary marker between Ukrainians and Russians, widening the otherwise relatively narrow cultural gap.’ In the context of European enlargement and the absence of any perspectives of accession for Ukraine in the foreseeable future, Russian cultural influence (external and internal) is seen as a source of Ukrainian problems. Significantly, it is represented not so much by ethnic Russians, but mainly by Russian-speakers, whose continuing presence symbolises exactly this unwanted mixture of Russian and Ukrainian cultural elements (Little Russianism), and the very lack of clear boundaries of the Ukrainian nation. The fact that Ukrainian identity is distorted is not the only problem for

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building the nation state and ‘dissoluted’ in other cultural elements; from this point of view, the presence of Russian-speakers also perpetuates the cultural dominance of Russia and makes possible its political interference. That a significant share of the population prefers Russian newspapers and TV channels means that the Ukrainian audience (and public sphere) is split, and Russia can impose its cultural and political influence. Massive participation of Russian business in Ukrainian privatisation and active lobbying of its interests by the Russian government also can be seen as a dangerous openness of Ukraine to the East. Cultural, economic and political distancing and ‘delimitation’ from Russia is considered a necessary condition for successful nationbuilding, and in this context the new Ukrainian–Russian interstate border is invested with special meaning. The present state border between Ukraine and Russia coincides with the former administrative line between the Ukrainian SSR and the Russian Federation, which was eventually established in 1927 (with the exception of the Crimea, which was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954). At the beginning of the 1920s, Ukraine was in a border dispute with Russia, claiming some parts of the Kursk and Voronezh regions inhabited by a Ukrainian-speaking population (in 1918 these claims included also the Kuban region). As a result of a compromise, Ukraine got approximately one-third of the claimed territories, but lost Taganrog and the Shakhty district in Donbas. The position of Ukraine was grounded on the principle of ‘ethnographic territory’ (defined mainly by language), and the most famous Ukrainian academics of that time were engaged in justifying these claims. In contemporary Ukrainian literature it is common to mention that Ukraine ceded part of its ethnographic territory under the ‘imperial’ pressure of Russia. But the very fact that the Russian–Ukrainian border was not just voluntarily drawn on the map, as were other internal Soviet administrative borders, but negotiated between two governments, proves that the Ukrainian SSR had some state sovereignty and bargaining power in these negotiations. Although Russia officially recognises the territorial integrity and present borders of the independent Ukraine, and the disputes over the Crimea and the Black Sea fleet seem to be solved or not politically relevant, the issue of the Ukrainian–Russian border again came into the focus of political debates during the last two years. The present status of the border, which is still relatively open and permeable (Ukrainians and Russians can travel with their internal passports and without visas) is increasingly seen by the Ukrainian political elite as unacceptable. One of the articles in the central Ukrainian newspaper Den was titled ‘Ukrainian–Russian border as a symbol of unfinished nation-building’, and this title reveals the core of the problem. Although both sides, Russia and Ukraine, successfully reached an agreement on the delimitation of almost the whole length of the inter-state border (the status of the Sea of Azov and the Kerch Strait is still being discussed), on the issue of demarcation (marking the boundary on the territory) they maintain different and hardly reconcilable positions. Russia sees the borders inside the NIS Commonwealth as ‘internal’ and considers their demarcation superfluous. Ukraine insists on the demarcation of the Ukrainian–Russian border and on observing the principle of the equal status of all state borders. For the

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Ukrainian political elite, a ‘normal’ border with Russia would symbolise the success of the nation- and state-building process and demonstrate Ukraine’s ‘European choice’ to the West. But the economic dependence on Russia and the business interests of the ruling elite also affect the Ukrainian ‘border policy’ and render it ambivalent. Actually, both Russia and Ukraine are moving to the more regulated and restrictive border regime, which is legitimised from both sides by the need to fight illegal migration, smuggling and criminal business (trafficking of drugs and weapons). Only in the case of Ukraine, this process is invested with the additional meaning of building the ‘normal’ nation state and its ‘normal’ borders. Naturally, the changes in the regulation regime of the Russian–Ukrainian border are largely determined by the European enlargement process. The EU already proposed some assistance to Ukraine in arranging its border with Russia according to international standards. In this way, the logic of European enlargement reinforces nationalist fantasies and fears in Ukraine, which are reflected in the old joke: ‘The misfortune of Ukrainians is that God has put the Carpathians on the wrong side’.

Conclusion This comparison between the failed Yugoslavia and the newly born Ukraine, focused on language, ethnicity, and their role in the reconstruction of cultural boundaries, is of course rather ambiguous. But regardless of all reservations, it can shed some additional light on the question behind most political debates in Ukraine today: is the formation process of the modern Ukrainian nation irreversible? It still seems that Soviet bonds are mainly what keep Ukrainians together, and in this sense Soviet Ukrainian identity (even if some people actively deny the first element of it, and others have difficulties with the second one) turned out to have a longer life than the Yugoslav one. Ukrainian identity still remains (post-) Soviet and ethnically rather irrelevant, despite all attempts to reconstruct it as an ethnolinguistic and political alternative to the Soviet one. Regional cultural and historical differences were politicised, but Russian ethnic nationalism (as well as Ukrainian radical nationalism in most parts of Ukraine) has received almost no support. The stability of the new Ukrainian state was preserved due to the position of the Ukrainian political elite, who accepted the agenda of ‘United Ukraine’; some representatives of the regional elites (especially in the East and in the Crimea) sometimes manipulated the idea of separatism, but in fact were not attracted by the choice of reintegration with Russia or by repeating the Transdnistrian scenario. Part of Ukrainian society, which welcomed state independence, had hopes for the future of the nation, and the other part still experienced the shock of the collapse of the USSR and was difficult to mobilise politically in both a positive and a negative sense, but both attitudes helped to keep the country together. The other question is that the often-praised Ukrainian stability, which looks like an advantage against the backdrop of Balkan turbulence, becomes a hopeless stagnation when compared to the more successful Central European countries. The current crisis of the Ukrainian political regime, which coincided with (and was intensified by) the first wave of European enlargement, contributes to the tendency of fortifying the cultural boundaries in Ukraine, with language

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becoming a marker of political orientations. It seems that (post-) Soviet/Ukrainian identity tends finally to split along the slash line, and this again brings the future of a single Ukrainian nation into the political agenda. This split is reinforced by the illusion of a geopolitical choice Ukrainian society has to make: the choice between a pro-Russian and a pro-European orientation. Being excluded from the European enlargement process in the foreseeable future, Ukraine is drifting politically and economically towards Russia, and this drift is often compensated for by the gestures of ‘delimitation’ with Russian language and culture. Significantly, Western Ukrainian political and intellectual elites cannot accept the current status of the Ukrainian language and Ukraine’s future isolation from united Europe. These elites use the issue of space for regional identities and regional development to bring the idea of federalist reform in Ukraine into political debates. Even the possibility of a ‘Galician nation’ as a historical, cultural and linguistic entity is discussed, and one of the main hopes behind this project is that this reduced and supposedly more European ‘Ukraine’ will be more easily accepted by the EU. The question still remains of whether the social and political stagnation can be overcome without losing stability, or in other words, whether post-Soviet Ukrainian identity can be transformed into a modern national one, thus avoiding the reification of language and ethnicity and without fortifying re-emerging cultural boundaries. Notes 1. To complete the parallel with Yugoslavia, the creators of the Ukrainian language also faced an alternative between the Cyrillic and Latin alphabet, but the eventual choice was made in favor of Cyrillic. 2. ‘United Ukraine’ is the name of the pro-presidential political block, which represents the interests of the former communist nomenclatura transformed into oligarchs. The irony of contemporary Ukrainian history is that the nationalist dream of Ukraina irredenta and Soborna Ukraina was stolen by former communists and completely discredited by their policy in the eyes of Ukrainian citizens. 3. Russian nationalist discourse demonstrates the mirror image of this ethnicity construction process by defining three main ethnic groups in Ukraine: ethnic Russians, Ukrainians or Little Russians (which are close to the first ones culturally and linguistically), and ‘Galicians’ who historically developed very different cultural and geopolitical orientations and are actually part of Western and not of Slavic civilisation.

References Wilson, A. (1998) Redefining ethnic and linguistic boundaries in Ukraine: Indigenes, settlers and Russophone Ukrainians. In G. Smith, V. Law, A. Wilson, A. Bohr and E. Allworth (eds) Nation-building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 7

Language, Borders, Identity: A Response to Ranko Bugarski MARIJA MITROVIC´ Università di Trieste, italy The paper written by Ranko Bugarski made a deep impression on me: I had known most of the facts he has stated, but he succeeded in presenting them in the order that made the very chaotic and compex linguistic situation very clear to me, especially in the part that was once referred to as ‘the Serbo-Croatian language space’. As a linguist, Bugarski spoke about the trends present in linguistic theories and sociolinguistic practice, about an enormous number of attempts to resolve the Serbo/Croatian linguistic question in the direction steered by centripedal forces, and an even bigger number of those that resolve this problem following the track of centrifugal forces. At one point, before passing on to the conclusion, he refers to the current situation in Vojvodina and mentions the problem of the newly arrived Serbs, who in that, since time immemorial, multilingual and multicultural province, suddenly, due to their minimum linguistic differences, feel as foreigners, and their language as ‘alien’. He gives an example that really struck me: ‘a customer complained about being refused service in a market just because she had asked for vrecica rather than a kesa’. Bugarski writes about language and borders and about language and its function (use and abuse) in the creation of collective, ethnic, national, state identity. That paper induced me too to write a few sentences about language, borders and identity, but solely on the individual level. I must add: I would not have even dared state my contemplations on the indicated topics had I not also read the paper by Dubravko S˘kiljan, who introduces individual cases into the discourse. I am not a linguist in the narrow sense of the word, but language has often been the subject of my contemplations, especially in the past ten years since I have lived in Italy and used Italian in the biggest part of my daily communications. I lived in Belgrade before that, and I spent my youth in Vojvodina. I believe that my attitude towards language was formed in that multiethnic Vojvodina, formed so deeply that it distinguishes me to this day. On the eve of World War II, my parents arrived in Belgrade because my father was forced to flee the then fascist Italy: he had thrown a stone at the window of his former teacher, a Slovene, who had started speaking in Italian to his former students. During the war they were forced to flee the city too and settled down in a village in Vojvodina. That is where my first experience of language was formed: my father insisted that mostly Serbian be spoken in our home, although his mother tongue was Slovenian, and my mother’s the Kajkavian dialect of Croatian. In school, my best friend spoke only Slovak, and

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after we had walked the long three kilometres to school, she entered her Slovak and I my Serbian class. Our housekeeper was also a person who spoke only Slovak. No one ever tried to translate these languages, to establish any sort of mediation: we all understood each other perfectly, using more or less closely related Slav languages. When I visited my grandmother in the former Zone B, in Nova Gorica, from her phonograph in the attic of her old house I liked to listen to partisan songs in all ‘our’ languages, and most of the records were in Slovenian and Italian. Up in that enchanting attic there was also a book on Pinocchio in Italian, a story I had known from a Zagreb, that is, Croatian, edition that stood on a shelf at home, so I tried to understand it in the language it had been written in. In that same attic I also read Robinson Crusoe, but in Slovenian. And never had any of my parents or relatives even wondered: how was I, raised in Vojvodina, expected to know Slovenian? When you came to Slovenia, you were simply expected to speak in that language, or how else would you be able to talk to your grandmother or aunt if not in their/our language? The languages I was surrounded by in my youth are languages of minimal differences, and all it took to enter into a dialogue with a speaker of another language was a little bit of good will and a big wish to communicate. I came to Trieste after Yugoslavia had dissolved, and with it the SerboCroatian language, or – as Bugarski says – it was buried («A child of the Yugoslav idea from the very start, it shared its fate and was now buried, appropriately enough, in the same tomb with the federation»). Dubravka Ugresic formulates this very same fact in a somewhat more pathetic way: at the same moment when we were deprived of our homeland, without the country we had been born in, we were deprived of our language as well. But for me (and I believe for all those who had had a similar experience with language to my own – the experience of a linguistic communication ‘without frontiers’, communication in a few languages and yet without translation –) the most frightening aspect was the loss of broadness and freedom, the casual transit from one language to another. How can anyone who did not need to have words translated from Slovak, or Slovenian, or Kajkavian Croatian, accept that perhaps in that very same store where it was once possible to shop using all those languages, nowadays you cannot get what you want just because you use a wrong ‘variant’, because you said ‘vrecica’ instead of ‘kesa’! Although Trieste was not multilingual in my father’s time, not really up to the 1990s in fact, the city is nowadays in many ways similar to the Vojvodina of my childhood; it is true that the ‘main’ language is not Serbian, but Italian, but in numerous institutions and shops you will be able to speak in Slovenian or in ‘our’ – Croatian/Serbian/Bosnian – language. My father is not around any more to insist that at home you should speak the ‘main’ language, the majority language of the environment you live in; so instead of Italian I still speak Serbian at home. My Italian will never be as good as my Serbian, but perhaps the very reason for that is that deep inside I am distinguished by that very relaxed, extremely comfortable attitude towards language I adopted in my youth: the attitude of casual adoption, the attitude that makes you satisfied to communicate with a speaker of a different language without insisting on mastering the skill of speaking that language to perfection. The longer I think about it, the more it seems to me that this is exactly why

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I go on living and working in Trieste, despite the numerous problems and difficulties every foreigner inevitably encounters in a new environment. In the city I left I do not have that relaxed feeling when communicating any more. And it seems to me that I cannot do without it. Over here it gives me an enormous pleasure whenever I hear a local Slovene who is sovereignly in command of two languages: you listen to a conversation and cannot but feel the easiness and spontaneity with which he transfers from one language to the other. And on the other side of the border, there is an even more curious and appealing situation: in Istria, the so-called majority population (Slovenes and Croats) all speak Italian, that is, the language of the minority! I believe that my attitude towards language created in a multilingual environment is so deeply rooted in me that I cannot adapt to living in an environment in which language is becoming the main instrument of collective, or national, identification. And since linguistic barriers between the newly created states on the territory of former Yugoslavia are minimal, the freedom of utilisation of these minimal differences is minor: you are forced to take strict care not to use by any chance a word which is Theirs. Language distinguishes me, it is an instrument of my individual identity. But that language which distinguishes me operates by removing the borders with other languages or manages to reduce these borders to a minimum, to make them almost invisible. It is symptomatic, however, that in the part of the world R. Bugarski and D. S˘kiljan talk about in their papers, hardly anybody takes into consideration and hardly anybody writes about these individual values based on the attitude towards language, Today, from the perspective of my attitude towards language/languages, I am interested to know: what is the identity of actors who act in their second (or third) language, of writers who do not write in their mother tongue? Have we forgotten that, 150 years ago, in the period so well described in R. Bugarski’s paper, our writers wrote in at least two languages? France Pres˘ern even wrote letters to his parents in German, because for him to write prose meant to use German, and to write poetry meant primarily to use perfect Slovenian, although occasionally German as well. Although there are still a number of examples of writers from Asia, Africa, and even Europe who do not write in their mother tongue, the myth of the absolute value of mother tongue is persistently advocated today. To my students I often give the example I have found in the book called Uspomene (Memories) by Eva Grlic (Zagreb, 1998). It describes the beginning of the 20th century in Sarajevo from the point of view of a Jewish girl who arrived from Budapest: she spoke Yiddish and Hungarian, and her new relatives – her in-laws – spoke only Ladino and Serbo-Croat. There were two synagogues in the city, one for Sephardic and the other for Ashkenazi Jews. And yet they were all Jews. National identity can, but need not necessarily, be acquired through language. But individual identity – it seems to me – is firmly based on language. On an attitude towards language.

Chapter 8

Semantics of War in Former Yugoslavia: A Response to the Papers and Debate MELITTA RICHTER MALABOTTA Universtiy of Trieste, Italy At particular historical moments, ones that can be considered conflict situations or wars, people are inclined to forget that language has two essential functions: one, creative and communicative, and the other symbolic. The first one favours cultural exchanges and mutual understanding and enables complex societies to lead a common life. The second function is much more evident and relates language to symbol, to alphabet and to ethnic, national or even religious belonging. The first function is general and unifying, the second is particular and distinctive: it separates the several groups by emphasising their peculiarities. It depends on the state and on its linguistic policy to decide which degree of balance shall be kept between the two. More advanced civil societies are more oriented towards a communicative function in the spirit of tolerance and difference, while nation-based societies, which strive to strengthen their national identity, insist on symbolic function, on increasing distinctions, exclusivity, separateness. In former Yugoslavia, until recently, the majority of the people were used to being bialphabetical, that is, able to read and write both Latin and Cyrillic characters. Nowadays, the Cyrillic alphabet has been banned from the soil of Croatia, and ‘true ethnic cleansing’ of the language is under way. At the same time, after the self-proclamation of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia, the use of Latin characters was forbidden by government proclamations, and efforts are being made to eradicate a peculiar variety of the language, the so-called ‘Ijekavo’, which traditionally and historically pertains to the Croatian and Montenegrin ethnic groups, but has been spoken ‘as far back as anyone can remember’ by the Serbian population of Bosnia. The objective is to come nearer, even from the point of view of the language, to the Serbian fatherland, with no regard for the cultural damage produced by such a policy. By distancing themselves from the Latin alphabet and the ‘Ijekavo’ variety of the language, Serbians are distancing themselves from many substantial parts of their cultural heritage, from many of their own writers and from some of their best literary works. The connection between language and reality is quite complex, and it often reflects like a mirror whatever is happening in the life of the society. It creates deep emotional feelings of belonging. But only when it ignores the complexities of life in a multiethnic society, and when it becomes an ideology: then intolerance, aggression, a will to trace boundaries prevail. In newly formed nation states born on the soil of the former Yugoslavia, the

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factors of irrationalism, hostility, seclusion and xenophobia were very often a direct reflection of dramatic events that were transmitted to the domain of culture. Culture becomes ‘balkanised’. Often, it was used as a mere ornament that justified and evidenced a society’s pressures. The internal national market crumbled into pieces, narrowed down and set new borderlines on an ethnic basis. There were attempts at linguistic purification; still, there is special care taken not to smuggle foreign expressions into the word stock, especially not ‘Serbisms’ in Croatia and ‘Croatisms’ in Serbia. Both sides insist on using their alphabet. (cf. Malabotta, 1995). In his book Language, from Peace to War, the well known linguist Ranko Bugarski examines the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the language, its forced division, and the general depauperation produced in the Balkans by short-sighted nationalistic policies in the domain of language and culture: ‘In the same way as boundaries of the new states have been drawn with the help of tanks and guns’,says Bugarski, ‘guns are used, figuratively speaking, also on language. Those who (…) describe themselves as winners, believe that they can be arbiters also in linguistic questions; they are the ones who design new language frontiers. All this derives from one psychological model, which looks for the solution of every problem in the use of force. This is nothing other than violence on language’. (Bugarski, 1994: 117)

Serbo-Croatian, Croato-Serbian, Serbian and Croatian: Some historical perspectives Language questions are never mere linguistic questions. The meaning and position of language are not the same in every society and in every culture. History has shown that nations without a state have always emphasised the primary importance of the language question: tongue was crucial, to a no lesser degree than the national question itself. Fears about the nation’s survival, sometimes aspirations to an independent state, came to be condensed into language. In the history of the Serbo-Croatian, or Croato-Serbian or Croatian and/or Serbian language, the very name of the tongue has always amounted to a political question. On the basis of their genesis and place among Slavonic languages, no linguist was ever prepared to divide Serbian from Croatian; but no one would ever deny, either, the differences between the Croatian and Serbian literary languages or the diversity of their respective creative literary powers, which like superstructures stand out above the spoken tongue. Different ages and different social and political circles have interpreted such differences in different ways. In spite of resistance by the many national particularities and parochialisms, which we shall not discuss here, we could say that by the end of the last century the idea of linguistic unity in the service of national and political unity was gaining ground among Croatian, Serbian and Slovenian intellectual circles. Much was contributed by poets and writers of the three ethnic groups. After World War I, several Croatian writers who accepted Yugoslav ideals wrote in the ‘Ekavo’ variety peculiar to the Serbian language, and several Serbs used ‘Ijekavo’, which, as we said before, was proper to the Croatian and Montenegrin literary language and only to a minority of Serbs. Using one or

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other variety, one or other vocabulary, did not mean abjuring national identity or ethnic and literary belonging. Generally speaking, it can be stated that linguistic differences underlining Serbian or Croatian cultural identity have been, at certain times, belittled or even denied (when the unitarian feeling was prevailing), while at other times they have been emphasised and exaggerated to the point of linguistic separatism, following a political will to separate, and to radicalise differences. Linguistic division marks the political need to assert explicitly national identities. At crucial turning points in history, language cannot be viewed apart from the general trend of culture, which in turn follows politics. Often, language becomes its rallying flag. History shows that the question of language, the consciousness of its central role, reflects the ideological outlook of the times, and their social and political tensions.

Language and Identity When a larger territorial state breaks up to smaller nation states, when a pluralistic cultural area is broken into smaller homogeneous areas, a need to define national languages comes to the fore. Quite often, this pays no regard to philological sciences. The dissolution of Yugoslavia highlighted the language question: a war of territories has been extended to a war of language questions. Its partition, its national identity, has been the object of battle, even if it has been difficult to mark a dividing line. This might be the reason why the battle has been so violent and merciless. Croatian, the language of the newly constituted state, in search of a legitimisation in every field, resorted to archaism, to the forging of new words, doing whatever was in its power to erase from the language whatever could recall the common past of Southern Slavs. The question of language becomes a question of the state, the people, its identity and even its survival. The new axiom is: Croatian and Serbian are different languages, and if the difference is not obvious, it shall be created. New dictionaries and new spelling rules are then published, emphasising the differences of the Serbian and Croatian languages. Every day the media, and particularly the press and the radio, devote time and space to advising on the correct usage of the national vocabulary. It is necessary to insist tirelessly on educating the population, since the new words appear alien or abstruse to many. Several people experience self-censorship: when they make a mistake and pronounce a ‘proscribed’ word, they immediately correct themselves. Many take care not to utter words that only a few days before were their everyday speech, because they might betray their ethnic diversity, or place on the speaker an unwanted ideological mark.1 The universal trend is: to be uniform with the national tune, never to reveal one’s own diversity. The situation reached the point of absurdity when the Zagreb review Jezik (The Tongue) launched a prize for ‘the best Croatian word of the year’ (cf. Gudz˘evic´ 1996). This very popular competition was won by a university professor who in one year coined 400 new words, the so-called ‘zamjedbenice’, or Croatian substitute words. Like him, many linguists felt that a post war period was the right historical moment to design the Croatian language and its destiny, identifying it with the destiny of a whole people. Other linguists wonder whether actual exclusivity in linguistic policy and the absurd drafting

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of bills on the language (such as a proposal that suggested establishing a fine for use of proscribed words which appeared in the Sabor, the Croatian parliament) are not actually the result of a conscious, deliberate intention to exclude entire social and ethnic groups from the space of public communication. Because it is evident that members of entire social groups could not, would not want to and would not know how to use ‘newspeak’. Patriotic makers of newspeak ignore the fact that the identity of a language does not consist in its differences from the other one, but in the language itself, in its nature. In the Balkan area, ‘language’ is often used as synonymous with ‘people’, although scholars know well that there is no equation. According to Eric Hobsbawm, it is today improbable that language could be used as a criterion for the existence of a nation: ‘It is just one of the criteria by which people initiate their belonging to certain human community’. (Hobsbawm, 1993: 69) Up to this point, we have discussed interaction between Serbian and Croatian, or rather the internal dynamics of Serbo-Croatian, since this was the language used by the two majority populations of the former Yugoslavia. The relations between these two peoples and their relation to language reflected their (dis)connection from the other languages and the other Southern Slav peoples, and determined linguistic policy in other social and cultural circles. As hinted before, language problems emerging with unexpected energy in ‘ex’ Yugoslavia were often harbingers of an unease that was accumulating in other spheres: namely, economic and political. This was evident in the early 1960s, when Zagreb intellectual circles began to criticise the Novi Sad Agreement2, and advanced the thesis of the discriminatory position of Croatian. This was the basis of the ‘Declaration on the denomination and position of the Croatian literary language’ of 1967, the real forerunner of the ‘Croatian Spring’ (1971): the first nationalist-inspired mass movement with autonomist claims in socialist Yugoslavia. In Slovenia as well, the first official protest against Belgrade centralism, in 1965, was recorded in the Declaration against the use of Serbo-Croatian in the Army, and lots of people marched against a trial in which the editors of the Ljubljana review Mladina were due to appear in court (speaking in SerboCroatian) for publishing a desecratory dossier on the People’s Army. This was a historical event for peaceful Ljubljana: freedom to speak Slovenian on an equal basis was the match that set fire to economic and political claims with an autonomist slant. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, a similar process has recently been started (1991), when Muslim politicians invited the population to answer ‘Bosniak’ to the language question in the census: results show that more than 90% of the Muslim population followed the advice. Not much later (1995) a Dictionary of Bosniac language was published in Sarajevo by Alija Isakovic´, a work that asserts the identity of the Bosniak language, not as a variety in respect of the norm (Serbo-Croatian), but as a norm in itself (cf. Besker, 1995). Its author launches a passionate analysis of peculiarities in the Bosniak vocabulary, although without a consistent method and without stating clear criteria for the ‘Bosniak’ character of words. At the same time, the Muslim nationalist press abounds with ‘Turkisms’, that is Turkish words and verbal forms, and the use of ‘h’ – peculiar to Turkish – is growing, as is the frequency of Arabic words. And, as revealed by Nicole Janigro (1995),

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the Sarajevo government has started to rename towns and mountains, villages and rivers, in the attempt to make real the continuity of the state in the Bosnia-Herzegovina from the medieval empire of Tvrtko, to Tito’s Republic of Yugoslavia, to the ‘resistance’ of today. A like process, besides, is under way in all other states emerging from ‘ex’ Yugoslavia, who look for the legitimisation of their identity in the myth of selective history or in the (para) historical mythology of their nations. In the Balkans, perhaps more that anywhere else, language becomes an element in the power game, an instrument for exerting authority and holding on to it. More than elsewhere, language takes the role of the ideological and political weapon and, in accordance with the historical moment, it is used to create unions (not only cultural ones) or, in other cases, to destroy everything done by previous generations and by their intellectual thought. At that point, entire cultural heritages are swept away, ‘non adequate’ authors are marginalised, and their works disappear from shelves in bookstores and from desks in schools. Differences between languages are radicalised in order to emphasise belonging to different cultures, nations or, sometimes, religions. National states that ‘solve’ the question of language by establishing a total control over it move away from ideas of universalism, cosmopolitanism and tolerance. The national issue prevails over all the others and, as Matvejevic´ says, it ‘is banalised or reduced to a limited number of stereotypes. Writing tends to identify itself with a patriotic act. A writer transforms into a tribune’ (Matvejevic´, 1984: 69). Language, as well as extreme nationalism, has two essential functions: the integrating one, within the framework of a certain community, and the marking one, when relating to other communities. In the physical disintegration of Yugoslavia (and many think that it was written long ago on a linguistic map), extreme ethnic nationalism has had a decisive role, kindled and used by national élites in former republics. In this context language, or more precisely, its symbolic aspect, is exalted (its alphabet, lexis, ‘purity’, orthodox norms…), and becomes one of the pillars of the so-called ‘soul-of-the-people’. Other pillars which extreme nationalism feeds on are strongly symbolic too: the fatherland, the father of the nation, the national anthem, the flag, the coat of arms. In his analysis of extreme nationalism and language, Bugarski says: Relationships between integrating and marking functions are particularly visible on a linguistic level. Members of a community must conform to their interior and take distance from the surrounding environment: it is desirable that everybody uses the same language or the same version of it and the same alphabet, necessarily different from those, usually related ones, used by neighbouring communities. (Burgarski, 1994: 133) In such a process, language became one of the essential elements of creating ‘we’ and ‘them’ groups, a stigma for ‘otherness’. Today, in the area of former Yugoslavia, everything that represented the texture of union and gave life to interdependence among Southern Slavic peoples is destroyed and considered definitely past. Even personal links, human relationships and marriages are strongly dissuaded by force or by blind self-destructive obedience to the nationalistic call.3

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A hard and sometimes grotesque battle is being waged in the area of culture, which becomes more and more similar to a battle for territories. It reaps its victims from among men of culture and among many young people who lack defence mechanisms against the indoctrination emitted by the mass media and by a national system of education. The damage, caused by the reduction of the cultural market and by the disappearance of the experiences of meeting ‘others’, of exchange and of mutual discovery and examining, is irreparable. It strikes above all the true creative minds and the young generations who more and more often search (and find) the way of exile and emigration. We are getting further and further from the positions of men of culture who, like the greatest Croatian writer, Krlezˇa, considered Croatian and Serbian one language which Croatians call Croatian and Serbs Serbian. Or from linguists such as Jonke, who wrote: ‘Serbo-Croatian is one but not unitary language’. We are also far from the conviction of all those European and world men of culture who believe that linguistic variety is always an element of cultural enrichment. Today, Serbo-Croatian has no rescue. According to Gudz˘evic´: the linguistic hysteria of the Southern Slavs affirms nothing less but that all those things that had the function of a generally relating, common and defining (codifying) link in the Serbo-Croatian language should now be considered as unnatural, artificial, Croato-Montenegrino-Bosniaco-Serbophobic – and this applies also to all the works which made possible the codified use of that language. (Gudz˘evic´, 1998: 165) And Janigro adds: it will follow the destiny of everything which was divided in former Yugoslavia: nations and peoples, party and State, army… The linguistic cultural space is going to be a new Babel (Janigro, 1995:73) A Babel that will leaven linguistic differences more and more, in its chaotic complexity, reflecting clearly a political will to radicalise the furrows and barriers between Southern Slavic peoples.

Semantics of War The deepening of the furrows (not only in a linguistic field) would not be enough to explain the semantics of war in former Yugoslavia. This semantics was inaugurated by political discourse and fuelled daily by the mass media spreading war-mongering propaganda. Bugarski calls it ‘verbal artillery’, which not only preceded but also prepared the ground for armed conflict, with a skilled use of the language of division and hate, the legacy of World War II. In order to illustrate his idea, Bugarski quotes the massive use of words such as ‘cˇetnik’ or ‘ustasˇa’ a long time before similar paramilitary formations appeared and started inflaming the war: As the war went on, the ghosts of the past tendentiously invoked by politicians turned into real people made of flesh and blood, and so both cetniks and ustase also became, in large numbers, part of the tragic reality. And when the war moved to Bosnia-Herzegovina, the third party present there had to be treated on an equal footing, and so the mujahedin were invented,

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much before the arrival of the first fighters fitting the name arrived from abroad. (Bugarski, 1994: 88) When an ethnic, national, ideological or religious human community is being represented by a word-symbol (mark) which has a deeply negative charge in another community, close to the first but divided by tragic historical events such as war and the associated suffering, it is very easy to perceive the other community as ‘the other’, ‘hostile’, and then proceed to its systematic dehumanisation. It was exactly this tireless linguistic preparation for the forthcoming conflict between the Serbs and Croats, and later also Muslims, which made the war, for the majority of people, not only possible, but even inevitable – one could almost say natural. In a similar way, the irresponsible use of the word ‘genocide’ preceded the genocidal acts/facts which deeply agitate the universal essence of humanity of each individual, but are more acceptable when the horrible facts ‘only confirm’ the repetitive propaganda linking the crime to a specific nation/people/ideology. Each side then necrophiliacally uses ‘its own’ mass graves, not by condemning the universal character of the crime, but by matching itself against the perpetrator, who ‘is anyway known to have always done these things’, who is ‘a historically proven monster’. The semantics of war also used ‘inventive’ compound words which have also contributed to the creation of ‘otherness’. We can quote the example of a linguistic ‘creation’ such as ‘Yugounitarian-Serbocetnik-outlaw group’, used by the Croatian war machinery propaganda. Conversely, the Serbian media started using a term stigmatising an entire nation: ‘ustasa-genocidal-Croatian nation’. ‘Ethnic cleansing’, a syntagm rapidly adopted by the worldwide public in order to mark the horrors of the wartime insanity which pounced fiercely upon the civilian population of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo, which really defies description, has become one of the sad linguistic legacies of the 20th century. Unutterable horrors are therefore annulled by a formulation which contains the very aseptic word ‘cleansing’, reminiscent somewhat of ‘dry-cleaning’, a term relating not to humans but to fabrics, clothing... Similar syntagms push us farther away not only from the act itself but also from the responsibility of its perpetration. Everything is being somehow rinsed, washed, cleansed, made aseptic, indeterminate, fatal, given. Thus the semantics of war not only anticipates reality but distorts it as well. One could not say that this is an exclusive feature of the Balkans and the result of the latest disgraceful war experienced by Europe at the end of the 20th century. The concentration camps, with which the Nazis have shamed humankind by killing millions of human beings, also had, even symbolically, something in common with cleansing, showering, washing, haircutting, scissors, soap... and with a hair-splitting racial ‘engineering’. The bombs falling in Afghanistan in 2002, killing the civilian population, are being called ‘collateral effects’ at press conferences, thus evoking more the words of caution printed on drug packaging and indicating possible insomnia than the death they are sowing. However, there are words that were really created during the war in the Balkans in order to denote hitherto unnamed phenomena. The first one is ‘urbicide’, used in the writings of the architect and humanist Bogdan Bogdanovic´ the former mayor of Belgrade living in exile in Vienna, which denotes the savage destruction of cities, the civilian population

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and of all the symbols of urban culture, and from a safe distance at that (the most evident example being the siege of Sarajevo). The other one is ‘democratorship’, a compound coined by Predrag Matvejevic´, a Romance scholar at the La Sapienza University in Rome, a writer and humanist from Mostar, who used this term in order to describe, with an extraordinary precision, the transformation from multiethnic and pluricultural societies into mononational and monocultural communities, which base their change on elements of Western democracy (multiparty elections, rule of law, etc.) subordinating them to the personality cult, the domination of extreme nationalist ideology and homogenisation of the society: A singular symbiosis, therefore, of democracy and dictatorship. In spite of the fact that all these terms express extremely well a) the fierceness of war blindness and b) the post-war realities of the nation states that emerged from the former Yugoslavia, the majority of the citizens of this territory would have been happier if they had not contributed in any way to enriching the world lexical fund. The abuse of words or their use in war propaganda or daily politics induces, in a part of the population, an (in)sensitivity to words void of meaning such as ‘to free’, ‘traitor’, ‘victim’, ‘victory’, ‘cleansing’, ‘patriot’, ‘homeland’, ‘defence’, ‘protection’, ‘dignity’, etc.; their distortion, the draining of their meaning and the artificial fuelling of their inherent charge have led to the relativisation of these words or to the complete loss of their original meaning in the post-war period, when many people (not all of them – often not even the majority) have already understood that ‘liberation’ often meant the conquest of new territories, that ‘defence’ meant crimes against the civilian population, that ‘cleansing’ was a synonym for death, that ‘our heroes’ are often criminals guilty of violating the universal laws of humanity. Sociolinguistics would have an unfathomable quantity of material for research on word abuse during war conflicts, and not only in the Balkans. In this contribution we shall stress only a few tailor-made syntagms produced in preparation for NATO’s armed intervention (bombing) in Kosovo and the bombing of Belgrade. NATO’s interventions were labelled an ‘international police operation’ (Javier Solana), ‘humanitarian interference’, ‘immaculate compulsion’, ‘holy war’, ‘just, based on values rather than on territorial ambitions’ (Tony Blair), ‘intelligent bombs’; the deaths of civilians caused by such ‘intelligent bombs’, which among others killed many Kosovo Albanians, were defined as ‘collateral effects’. These collateral damages, classified sometimes as ‘mistakes’, include the ruins of Serbian TV, a disemboweled train, a hospital torn to pieces, a burned column of refugees... In analysing the language by which the Italian press accompanied NATO’s military actions in Kosovo and in Serbia, some journalists (cf. Giacopini, 2000; Mortellaro, 1999) have remarked that the majority of intellectuals were forced into a ‘culture of impotence’, where freedom is reduced to obeying or disobeying, and democracy to media manipulation of consensus by emotion. This is considered to be an escape from responsibility. Others considered the Italian participation in the military interventions as ‘realpolitik’: something we can choose, something we can do. The decision to bomb Belgrade, the choice to obey NATO’s diktat, to fall in line with the orders of the American allies, are the occasion to change the future, to build a different

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world (...) we have to be there, to participate, we must not withdraw; we have to create history, change destiny’ (Giacopini, 2000: 134–135). We are not dealing therefore with a general confusion of words but with a choice of ‘double track’ policy: on the one hand, military strategy, and on the other, help and solidarity. The Italian left-wing government4 drew simultaneously upon the code of force and upon the vocabulary of solidarity. In this way the term ‘solidarity’ and even the adjective ‘humanitarian’ have lost their original sense, becoming worn-out names, swept up by the semantics of war, sucked up by their own logic. The mere pronunciation of those terms, simple and deep, awakens/awoke the sense of falsehood. Solidarity and voluntary service absorbed by the war demonstrate how a word (in this case, accompanied by accurately selected televisually transmitted images) can contribute to a kind of lobotomy of the public opinion and how (even) ‘in a democratic society bombs are not enough to make war; a rhetorical apparatus is necessary, it is necessary to convince, it is necessary to persuade’ (Giacopini, 2000: 31) Language is necessary for war. A word can have a fatal charge or carry out psychological preparation for the speech of weapons. But we must not forget, when we deal with the destiny of the Southern Slavs, that the very same language, is capable of playing the role of uniting and not separating, that it was a means of communication and understanding during long historical periods, and that it is wrong to bind it to one ideology or one state. To conclude, let us restate a universally known sociolinguistic principle according to which language is not a prevalently political phenomenon; but it is easy ground for social and political turmoil, whose causes are located outside the linguistic domain. Notes 1. For instance, the well-spread greetings ‘Zdravo’ (derived from ‘To your health’ but spread as ‘Hello’) has completely disappeared from daily use because it is considered too tightly linked to communist past and because it recalls the traditional greetings used by the partisans during the liberation war. The same is valid for the words ‘drug’, ‘drugarstvo’ (comrade, comradeship)… Brochures with indication of undesirable terms (mostly Serbian) which must be strictly avoided have been distributed to speakers of the Croatian television and to corrispondent operators in other mass media. 2. cf. Bugarski this issue re. Novi Sad Agreement. 3. Not long ago mixed marriages were considered the natural ‘cement’ of Yugoslavia, as it happens, besides, in all multiethnic societies where internal dynamics stimulates populations to meet; now such marriages have become unthinkable, if not even forbidden in many parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina, conquered by the new winners. 4. The period of D’Alema government.

References Besker, I. (1995) La lingua bosniaca ed il suo Dizionario. Napoli: Salvistica. Bugarski, R. (1994) Jezik od mira do rata. (Language from Peace to War). Beograd: Beogradski Krug. Giacopini, V. (2000) Una guerra di carta, il Kosovo e gli intelettuali. Milano: Elèuthera. Gudz˘evic´ S. (1998) Cuius Regio, Eius Lingua, breve intervento sulla guerra linguistica serbocroata, Fondo Moravia, Quaderni no. 1. Gudz˘evic´ S. (1996) Der serbo-croatische Sprachkrieg. In Blätter für deutsche und internationale Polititik. Bonn 8, 980–986.

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Hobsbawm, E. (1993) Nations and Nationalism since 1780, Programme, Myth, Reality. Croation edition: Nacije i nacionalizam, program, mit i stvarnost. Novi Liber, Zagreb. Janigro, N. (1995 ) The Battle of Neolanguages. Limes, Roma, No 3. Malabotta, M. R. (1995) Transmission in culture – the Balkan divergences. Paper presented to the 32nd International Congress ‘Dialogue between Cultures and Changes in Europe and the World’, International Institute of Sociology, Trieste. Matvejevic´, P. (1984) Jugoslavenstvo danas (Yugoslavity today). Belgrade: BIGZ. Mortellaro, I. (1999) I signori della guerra, la NATO verso il XXI secolo. Roma: Manifestolibri.