Bosanski jezik?

[Beyer, Tom]

what a wonderfully clear and readable explanation. thank you.
I do recall two incidents dating back to the 1970's when I studied
Serbo-Croatian in zagreb. The Croats always used simply harvatski to
describe the language and one girl in our group was insulted when she
tried to purchase a map of Yugoslavia in kirillica (interpreted by the
Croats as a Serbian version). Since you never knew, however, -or I at
least never knew how to identify in overhead speech alone a Croatian
from a Serbian, once outside of Croatia or Serbia  you could always just
ask  "Govorite nash jezik?" or I think I remember  "Govorite nashki?"
instead of Govorite  serpski, harvatski-or what no one wanted-
serpsko-harvatski.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alain Dawson [SMTP:orfqe at nordnet.fr]
> Sent: Friday, March 13, 1998 3:05 AM
> To:   SEELANGS at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
> Subject:      Re: Bosanski jezik?
>
> .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?
> >