Jelica Stojanović THE DEVELOPMENT PATH OF THE SERBIAN LANGUAGE AND SCRIPT MATICA SRPSKA – MEMBERS’ SOCIETY OF MONTENEGRO DEPARTMENT OF SERBIAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE Title of the original Serbian Edition: Jelica Stojanović, Put srpskog jezika i pisma, Belgrade, Srpska književna zadruga, 2017, The Blue Edition series For the publisher JELICA STOJANOVIĆ Editor DRAGO PEROVIĆ Translation NOVICA PETROVIĆ ©Матица српска – Друштво чланова у Црној Гори, Подгорица, 2020. Jelica Stojanović THE DEVELOPMENT PATH OF THE SERBIAN LANGUAGE AND SCRIPT Podgorica 2020 MILOš KOVAčEVIć THE DEVELOPMENT PATH OF THE SERBIAN LANGUAGE AND SCRIPT, MADE UP OF STRAY PATHS Only two years have passed from the two hundredth anni- versary of the beginning of Vuk Karadžić’s struggle for “intro- ducing the folk language in literature”, that is to say, from the introduction of the Serbian folk language in the Serbian literary language, or to put it in the more modern phrasing of today: the standard language. The beginning of that struggle is connected to the year 1814, when, in the royal city of Vienna, Vuk’s first grammar book came out: The Orthography of the Serbian Lan- guage Based on the Speech of the Common Folk, which dealt with resolving the three most important standard-related issues: a) the issue of the Serbian orthography, b) the issue of the morpho- logical structure of the Serbian language, and c) the issue of the name of the language and its national boundaries. Rare are the languages, if, indeed, there are any, which have had such a turbulent history of two hundred years. The histor- ical development of a language can be followed at two histor- ical levels: that of its internal and that of its external history. The internal history of Vuk’s Serbian language had a more or less normal development, one could even say that it developed in a straight line, moving along the paths of the stabilisation of its structure, conditioned by functional-stylistic reasons. As op- posed to its internal history, the external history of the Serbian language is entirely made up of “tremors”. There are so many of these “tremors” that they are to be found on almost every page of its two-hundred-year history. These two aspects of the history of the Serbian language were very much intertwined at the time of Vuk’s struggle for its standardisation and codification. Anyone who wishes to shed VI MILoš KOVAčević light on “the development path of the Serbian language” must take both these aspects into consideration. It is precisely how Jelica Stojanović approaches the historical path and the current situation of the Serbian language and the Cyrillic script in this book, published within the framework of the Blue Edition of the Srpska književna zadruga [Serbian Literary Commune] publish- ing house. Her book is a felicitous combination of internal and external characteristics of the Serbian literary language – in their diachronic and contemporary perspectives. This book is made up of seven studies by Jelica Stojanović: 1) The Serbian Language and the State-National Projects in the 19th and the 20th Centuries; 2) Vuk’s Reform of the Serbian Language in the Context of Two Principles: “Write as You Speak” and “General Regularity”; 3) The Language of Dubrovnik in the History of the Serbian Literary Lan- guage (As Shed Light Upon by Milan Rešetar); 4) The Continuity, Spreading and Status of the Serbian Cyrillic Script – Through the Centuries and Today; 5) The First World War – The Attitude -to wards the Cyrillic Script and Other Serbian National Symbols; 6) The Identity and Status of the Serbian Language in Montenegro (The Historical and the Contemporary Aspect),and 7) The Serbian Language in Montenegro in the Mirror of Linguistics and Politics. On the evidence of these titles, one can perceive three themat- ic aspects of Jelica Stojanović’s book. The first thematic whole, comprising the first three studies in this book, is made up of sci- entific papers dealing with the general linguistic/sociolinguistic diachronous and contemporary status of the Serbian literary lan- guage. The second thematic whole is composed of the two cen- tral papers, which deal with the historical and the current status of the Serbian Cyrillic script, whereas the third, final thematic whole is made up of two papers dealing with the historical and the current status of the Serbian language in Montenegro. On the one hand, Jelica Stojanović’s book shows that only historical facts can provide a ley to understanding various cur- rent problems associated with the Serbian language, and on the other, it shows that only on the basis of the contemporary state of FOREWORD VII the Serbian language can one properly understand some barely comprehensible historical acts that directly influenced the devel- opment path of the Serbian language. The book, thus, reflects in the best possible way the historical development of the Serbian language and the Cyrillic script in their current state, and she views the current situation of the Serbian language as the nec- essary result of its historical development. It is no wonder that the author dedicates the greatest amount of space in the book to the current linguistic situation in Montenegro, for it is the one least motivated historically, contrary to all the historical devel- opments and turns, both of the Serbian language and the Serbi- an national idea. Few scholars, if any, could have provided such a scientifically based description of the current situation of the Serbian language in Montenegro as Jelica Stojanović. As a superb language historian and a scholar to whom only scientific crite- ria matter, Jelica Stojanović has become a symbol of the defence of Serbian studies and linguistics as a science in Montenegro, a scientist who easily counters political ignorance by means of lin- guistic facts and criteria, a scholar who wishes to channel linguis- tic anarchy and direct it along the flows of the laws of linguistics, a scholar who exposes political “Montenegrinist” acts as qua- si-linguistic ones and sheds light on political manoeuvring and forgeries, steadfastly hoping that, in the case of Montenegro as well, the old adage that a lie has no legs will prove to be true yet. • Therefore, it is no wonder that Jelica Stojanović begins her book about the development path of the Serbian language and the Cyrillic script with a study of the Serbian language and state-national projects in the 19th and the 20th centuries. The fo- cus of her research is on the relationship between the language and the people, or to put it more precisely, on the determination of the people through the language. The interaction between the linguistic and the national necessarily invokes the issue of the VIII MILoš KOVAčević historical and the contemporary mutual relations between the language and the people. The majority of European nations – as many as fifty-six out of a total of fifty-nine – “take language as the foundation of culture” to be the basic identity criterion, along with the compactness of territory (Stojković 2008: 116). The Serbs belong to that vast majority, as their intellectual elite, from the very start, “viewed the nation as ‘a community of lan- guage’, where the language constituted a factor of its unification and linking of all the members of society. The concept of a lin- guistic type of nation was already to be found in the enlight- enment-oriented work of Dositej Obradović, which was how it determined the Serbian nation”, whereas “the definitive charac- teristic of a nation as ‘a community of language’ – specifically in the spirit of German Romanticism – was established through the linguistic-ethnographic research work of Vuk Karadžić” (Pišev 2013: 28–29). That is why, when considering the almost interdependent relationship between the Serbian language and the Serbian people, it is necessary to briefly point out how this relationship was interpreted by Dositej and Vuk. To Dositej and Vuk, the Serbs are all those who speak the Serbian language. And what Dositej and Vuk understood as Serbs – was almost never acceptable to all Serbs. “The Serbs” – Dositej says – “are called differently in different kingdoms and provinces: in Serbia they are called Serbians, in Bosnia Bosniaks, in Dalmatia Dalmatians, in Herzegovina Herzegovinians, and in Montenegro Montenegrins. They peaks the same everywhere, understand one another perfectly and easily, albeit they differ somewhat in their provincial pronunciation, and have taken some words over from the Turks in Turkey, and in the coastal region they have appropriated some from the Italians. [...] And even the commonest Serb from Banat or Bačka, no matter wheth- er he is in Serbia, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Dalmatia, espe- cially in Croatia, in Slavonia or in Srem, is surrounded by his own language and people, whether he be of the Eastern or of the Roman Christian faith” (Obradović 1989: 363). From the “boundaries” FOREWORD IX of the Serbs, as viewed by Dositej, it is evident that they are not called Serbs almost anywhere, but use the name of the province (place) where they live to refer to themselves. They have a com- mon language (“They speak the same everywhere”), but they do not share a common religion (“Serb... whether he be of the Eastern or of the Roman Christian faith”). Dositej would say the same thing, perhaps even a little more precisely formulated, at the beginning if his enlightenment-oriented work, in his pro- grammatic text – “A Letter to Haralampije” (1783): “Who does not know that the inhabitants of Montenegro, Dalmatia, Her- zegovina, Bosnia, Serbia, Cro-atia (except for Kajkavian speak- ers), Slavonia, Srem, Bačka and Banat (except for Wallachians) speak one and the same language? Speaking of the peoples living in these kingdoms and provinces, I understand as much those of the Greek Church as those of the Latin faith, without exclud- ing Bosniak Turks and Herzegovinians themselves, in view of the fact that faith may change, but the folk and the language can never be changed.