Bosanski jezik?

[Alain Dawson]

If you  consider the historical point of view, there was a time (maybe until
the beginning of the 19th century) when one could hardly establish a
commonly accepted list of Slavic languages, especially in the Balkans. The
reason was simply the lack of officially instituted languages, that is
languages supported by States or at least organized national groups, except
Russian, Polish and (only at the end of the 18th c.) Czech. With Panslavism,
there has been also a tendency to consider that there is only one Slavic
language with several dialects, and you can find some attempts to codify
this common language as a kind of Slavic "esperanto" (e.g. Krizanic, Linde,
Herkel', Majar-Ziljski), or by adopting one of the existing "dialects"
(usually Russian), or by restoring Old Church Slavonic (OCS).
The Balkans appear to be the region where establishing (official) language
boundaries has been a maximally arbitrary effect of historical events. They
have for a long time maintained OCS as their literary language. Meillet (in
1918) distinguishes only 2 languages (Serbo-croat and Bulgarian) where you
can find now 6 official norms (Bulgarian, Serbian, Croat, Bosnian, Slovene
and Macedonian). Bulgarian has been instituted with the independance of
Bulgaria (1878), but neighbouring Macedonian only in the titist Yugoslavia
in 1946 (the question whether Macedonian is an independant language or a
dialect of Bulgarian is more a political question than a purely linguistic
one). Concerning Slovene, Meillet wrote: "it is one of those artificial
creations used by the austrian administration to separate slavic Nations"...
but it is now the prosperous language of a prosperous new little country.
Now about Serbian, Croat and Bosnian. First of all, note they take place on
a dialectal continuum. At the beginning of the 19th century, the tendency
was to consider only one language called Illyrian, including also Slovene
and maybe Bulgarian/Macedonian. Different norms arised, at least Serbian,
Croat and Slovene, but they were very close to one another. The Illyrian
movement facilitated the convergence of the Serbian and Croatian norms,
confirmed in 1850 by the "Vienna agreement" between linguists and
writers (the Slovenes choosed to have their own norm). But even with a
common norm, Serbs usually called this common language Serbian, and Croats
Croatian... the term "Serbo-croatian" appears to be a linguistic term, not
used by ordinary people. Within the common norm, the possibility of minor
variations was kept (ekavica/ijekavica, use of cyrillic or latin alphabet,
vocabulary) but they could eventually not correspond to the distinction
between Serbian and Croat (e.g. you could write Serbian either with latin or
cyrillic letters).
The consequence of the recent arisal of nationalisms is to reinforce the
historical tendencies of language divergence. Each community chooses to
encourage its linguistic specificities and rejects the specificities of the
"enemy". To be a Serb means to use cyrillic letters and certain portions of
the formerly common vocabulary, to be a Croat means to use latin letters and
other portions of this vocabulary... I think yes, we witnessing the
splitting of a
common language into 2 (and now 3) separated languages, but it is
important to note this splitting concerns the official norms, not the
dialectal language which has always been variable (as any dialectal
language) in a manner much more complicated than the State boundaries.

Alain Dawson
orfqe at nordnet.fr


>Hello,
>
>Recently, I've encountered the term "bosanski jezik" several times,
>including a title of a small disctinary. Does it mean that the dialect
>of Serbo-Croat spoken in Bosnia is now considered as a separate language?
>Is it a temporary phenomenon which may disappear with the future
>development of the political situation of the former Yugoslav regions? Or
>are we witnessing an emergence of a new Slavic language? First of all,
>does a language called Serbo-Croat still exist? Or is it splitting into
>Serbian, Croat, and Bosnian? How do slavicists see the current
>linguistic situation of the region?
>