job opportunities

[Keith Goeringer]

Dear SEELANGERs,

I think I may have unwittingly stumbled upon a plan that promotes the
preservation of Slavic departments, and the availability of jobs for
graduates of same, provided the grads have training in Serbian/Croatian.

This is from an article on the Bosnian peace talks taking place in Dayton,
OH, and is from the 11/1 San Francisco Chronicle.  In a section named
_About the peace talks_, there is a subsection called _The language
barrier_:

          "The room for the ceremony has a round table covered with a blue
cloth.  Microphones have
        already been placed on the table for participants.  Booths have
been installed for simultaneous
        translation <sic> into Russian, English and French, as well as
Serbo-Croatian, Bosnian and
        Croatian.
                Although each side in the conflict claims to have a
separate language, all three were
        considered to speak the same before Yugoslavia's breakup in 1991."

For Slavic departments to demonstrate increased enrollments, they simply
cook the books a bit -- instead of one lousy Croatian/Serbian course, offer
three or four:  Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and perhaps Hercegovinian.  A
student in one is a student in all -- but only the department knows that!
The beauty of this is, it works at all levels of instruction.  It could
take the university administration a while to realize how odd it is that
those three courses have had the exact same enrollment for the past x
years.  (By that time, maybe enrollments will have improved...)

For grads (both under- and grad students), the solution is clear.  Attain
fluency in Croatian/Serbian, and market yourself as someone who is fluent
in 3-4 "different" languages.  So what if there are a few lexical
differences here or there, or a different alphabet or something?

Just an idea...

(And my apologies to those on LINGUIST, who will see the same clipping when
it gets posted there.)

Keith


Keith Goeringer
UC Berkeley
Slavic Languages & Literatures
keg at violet.berkeley.edu