Perspectives from the Social Sciences and Humanities

3 ROATIAN LANGUAGE STANDARDIZATION AND THE PRODUCTION OF NATIONALIZED POLITICAL SUBJECTS THROUGH LANGUAGE? CPerspectives from the Social Sciences and Humanities ka tribina 39, vol. 46, 2016., str. 3-45 46, 2016., str. 39, vol. ka tribina š Andrew Hodges Center for Advanced Studies – Southeast Europe (CAS SEE), etnolo University of Rijeka ! is paper focuses on language policy and social changes which have taken place in Croatia during and since the 1991-5 war. I " rst describe the historical background, the war and the nineties being marked by excesses of linguistic purism and prescriptivism, alongside the formation of post-Yugoslav states in which national belonging was key to de" ning citizenship. ! rough examining the relationship between changing linguistic and social orders, I raise a number of issues for discussion. I argue that the legal framework of minority language rights has consolidated and legitimated a nationalist imaginary, increasing social divisions and reinforcing hierarchies asserted by some nationalists between national categories. For this reason, I suggest that the uncritical endorsement of or promotion of linguistic diversity can be dangerous. Second, in an activist-anthropological vein, I discuss possible reasons why academics trained in the social sciences and humanities have rarely participated in sociolinguistic debates concerning the new Croatian standard. I suggest such discussions could greatly bene" t from interventions by social scientists, so as to bring sociolinguistics into contact with other strands of the social sciences and humanities and move away from what I believe to be a problematic policy focus on “identity”. Keywords: language policy, activism, linguistic anthropology, Croatia Introduction During and following what is commonly referred to in Croatia as the Homeland War (1991-5), linguists and language activists1 have engaged in extensive language planning and policy making with the aim of “emancipating” the standard – previously understood as part of a single Serbo-Croatian language – from a perceived Serbian in! uence and successfully garnering international support, including from the European Union, for the recognition of Croatian as a “language”.2 " ese activities have had a pronounced amount of popular support and debates concerning orthography, spelling rules, grammar and standard vocabulary have taken place in various public arenas in which concerns have been aired over the “correct” 1 Similar processes have taken place, in di# erent ways and to di# erent extents, in many other post-Yugoslav states. See Greenberg (2004) for an overview. 2 Croatian is now listed as an o$ cial EU language. See h% ps://euobserver.com/news/31340 (accessed 29. 10. 2015). " e text explicitly states: “Some Croatian o$ cials have said in the past that if the EU failed to accept Croatian as an o$ cial language it would be almost impossible to get the support of Croatian citizens in a referendum to join the EU”, emphasizing the strong politicization of DOI:10.15378/1848-9540.2016.39.01 original scientiﬁ c paper, submitted 30.11.2015., accepted 4.7.2016. c paper, scientiﬁ DOI:10.15378/1848-9540.2016.39.01 original the language issue and the legitimating importance for nationalists of Croatian being de& ned as a “language”. 4 DISCUSSION (pravilno) use of language, with “experts” o' en prescribing correct language use and discussions of common “mistakes” made by various publics a regular feature in the mainstream press.3 " ese reforms have reinforced a “monoglot standard” model (Silverstein 1996), his- torically common in Europe, in which languages are understood as “organised systems with centrally de& ned norms, each language ideally expressing the spirit of a nation and the terri- tory it occupies” (Gal 2006a: 163). From the perspective of many Croatian language activists (e.g. Babić, Finka and Moguš 1984; Gluhak 1990) and members of the public advocating such policies, this has resulted in the production of a linguistic hierarchy between standard and non-standard forms, in which many non-standard lexical items and forms, particularly those closer to standard Serbian in what is a South-Slavic dialect continuum, are understood to be less “cultured” (kulturni).4 To give one example, an emphasis on kultura as shaping im- aginaries concerning standardisation is visible in the statement made by a Croatian language activist from Vojvodina, Serbia. " is is a location in which I conducted linguistic anthropological & eldwork analysing the social, political and linguistic consequences of introduc- ing teaching in Croatian in Serbia, and I will occasionally draw on & eld observations during this debate. Vuković starts his article, named “How can we care for the Croatian language in Vojvodina?” (“Kako skrbiti za hrvatski jezik u Vojvodini?”), with a discussion of processes surrounding the Czech standard and Prague School (understood as both more “Western” and “Central European”): (…) Pražani ističu da je za određivanje norme standardnoga jezika relevantna u prvom redu uporaba obrazovanih i kultiviranih govornika. (…) " e Prague School emphasises that, when de& ning standard language norms, one of the most relevant features is language use by educated and cultivated (kultiviranih) speak- ers. (Vuković 2010a: 80, my translation) What is of interest here is the choice of comparison made with Czech, and the importance of education and kultura, when choosing standard language norms. Amongst certain language activists, standard forms are frequently demanded of pupils in the classroom (including in less formal, creative classroom tasks) and are sometimes demanded of others even in spoken interaction in everyday situations, resulting in a continu- ous “auto-correcting” of speech, which the linguist Kordić (2010) criticised in her book Language and Nationalism. To give another example, several friends who a% ended school in Zagreb during the nineties recounted how wri% en homework tasks were marked heavily down when they used the “da li” question form – understood by some nationalist oriented language activists as more “Serbian”, instead of preferred “more Croatian” alternatives. An unintended consequence of a strong insistence on purist and prescriptivist practices is a lack of linguistic con& dence amongst some teachers in using standard language in the classroom, who fear that their use of standard language is not good enough. For example, at the end of the Croatian course I a% ended at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, we went for a co# ee on an icy day, where the teacher described the pavement as slippery, using the word klizavo. One student then asked if sklisko, which isn’t used in Serbia, is the preferred standard form. " e teacher was unsure and then mentioned that one of her worries with the classes is over making mistakes surrounding which forms to use when teaching. 3 See for example, Večernji List (2014): h% p://www.vecernji.hr/zg-vijesti/nazive-avenija-dubrovnik-i-patacickina-ulica-trebalo- bi-izbjegavati-963175 (accessed 30. 11. 2015). 4 I have avoided the term diglossia so as to avoid misunderstanding given the range of ways in which the term is used (see Ja# e 1999: 18 for a discussion). I have opted instead for “hierarchies between language varieties”. ANDREW HODGES. Croatian Language Standardization… 5 Such linguistic hierarchies asserted directly relate to a social hierarchy asserted, whereby a more Eastern “Other” (such as Serbs) is viewed as lower down in a civilizational hierarchy, as described extensively in terms of Balkanism (Todorova 2009) and in Bakić-Hayden’s (1995) concept of “nesting orientalisms”. " ese processes have included extremes of linguistic purism – referred to as čišćenje jezika (language puri& cation) and prescriptivism. New “Croatian” words were sometimes invented, whilst archaic words were incorporated into standard language (justi& ed by referring to the standard as književni jezik – the literary language) with new lexical items being used in media discourses in order to avoid “internationalisms”, many of which were associated with standard Serbian, such as the word for aeroplane: avion or airport: aerodrom, compared to the standard Croatian zrakoplov and zračna luka. " is has included the minimization of borrowings (tuđice), particularly from language varieties viewed as undesirable in an inscribed Balkanist cultural hierarchy (such as Turkish, with the words Turkism and Serbism used by some activists as near synonyms). Many of these linguistic practices have had substantial popular appeal as well. Upon arriving in Zagreb for the & rst time in 2008, my use of everyday lexical items commonly identi& ed as Serbian (kesa/kesica (bag), pečurke (mushroom), dopuniti mobilni (top up a mobile phone), instead of the Croatian vrećica, gljive, nadoplatiti mobitel) were “cor- rected” frequently by people on the street in everyday situations such as ordering food or paying at the till. Importantly, not all of these “correcting” practices relate to prescriptivism. Some (e.g. pečurke) concern variants which had never been used in Zagreb, and which could therefore reasonably constitute the contents of a useful phrasebook translating standard/col- loquial Serbian-Croatian phrases. Others (e.g. dopuniti mobilini) relate to lexical items which became widespread following the start of the war, a period when there was relatively less language contact. Some, such as vrećica, reference prescriptivist interventions. What is clear here, and which also holds

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