SLAVICA HELSINGIENSIA 41 ED. BY JOUKO LINDSTEDT & MAX WAHLSTRÖM BALKAN ENCOUNTERS – OLD AND NEW IDENTITIES IN SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE HELSINKI 2012 ISBN 978-952-10-8538-3 (PAPERBACK), ISBN 978-952-10-8539-0 (PDF), ISSN 0780-3281 Željko Jozić1 Linguistic (Un)reality in Contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina This paper is a preliminary report on my research in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country with three official languages, Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. I wanted to find out how the present linguistic situation influences the students of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian philology and their perspectives after graduation. I placed the emphasis on what young people about to graduate think about the language policy in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and what they think about the new trends in the language they study. I asked about the other languages in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well, and what brought about this linguistic situation in their country, and finally, where this all will lead to. I thought that it was important to investigate what they thought of possible solutions; what, in their view, could be done to improve the situation; and what are the realistic chances of qualitative changes in the linguistic situation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Birth of Bosnia and Herzegovina In the early 1990s, as the result of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, a number of new states were founded. Autonomy and independence was first declared by Slovenia, then by Croatia, and finally by Macedonia in 1991. Bosnia and Herzegovina did the same in 1992. The independence of Montenegro was declared much later, in 2006—this was the result of the dissolution of a common state called Serbia and Montenegro. Kosovo, which was not a republic but an autonomous province of the former Yugoslavian federation, declared its independence from Serbia in 2008. The period of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina lasted from 1992 to 1995 (in Croatia from 1991 to 1995). The war ended in Croatia after Croatian military and police operations and in Bosnia and Herzegovina after 1 University of Helsinki. 33 Željko Jozić bombings by NATO and military operations by joint Croatian and Bosniak forces against the Serbs. In November 1995, a tripartite peace agreement was brokered in Dayton, USA, between the Croats, the Serbs, and the Bosniaks (represented by the heads of states: Franjo Tuđman, Slobodan Milošević, and Alija Izetbegović). The peace deal, called the Dayton Agreement, was signed by the three parties a month later in Paris. The Dayton Agreement divided Bosnia and Herzegovina into two parts called “entities”: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (which is controlled by the Bosniaks and Croats) and the Republic of Srpska (controlled by the Serbs). There is also a special administrative unit, Brčko District, jointly administered by the three nationalities. Map of Bosnia and Herzegovina 34 Linguistic (Un)reality in Contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina The appearance of these constitutional units was formed by the war, although there were certain territorial concessions. For example, the Croats handed over a part of central Bosnia, Mount Ozren. Serbs, in return, gave up the city of Odžak in Posavina, and the Bosniaks gained the capital Sarajevo, except for the eastern part of the hills around Pale, which is now called Eastern Sarajevo, renamed after being called Serbian Sarajevo by the Serbs during the war. But for the most part, the Dayton Agreement map was based upon the front lines of the three-year war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the map divides Bosnia into two parts. In the Republic of Srpska the majority of the population are Bosnian Serbs (including Serbs from Croatia who fled Croatian forces in August 1995), with the city of Banja Luka as their capital. In the other part, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the majority of the population are Bosniaks and Croats, with Sarajevo as the capital. Sarajevo is also the capital of the entire state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Background to the Current Linguistic Situation It is impossible to talk about Bosnia and Herzegovina and its language without taking a look at the situation in neighboring Croatia and Serbia. As a result of the dissolution of the common state, new states began to create their own language policies. Croatian became the official language in Croatia in 1990, and Serbian in Serbia a year later. Until the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, many Croatian (only rarely Serbian) scholars of the main standard language of Yugoslavia disputed over its name: it was known as “Serbo-Croatian”, “Croato-Serbian”, and even “Serbian or Croatian” and “Croatian or Serbian”. The official name always included both a Croatian and Serbian component until the fall of the state. The dispute over the name of the main language of Yugoslavia culminated in 1967 when “The Declaration on the Name and Status of the Croatian Language” (Deklaracija o nazivu i položaju hrvatskog književnog jezika) was published in Zagreb. It was supported by all the concerned cultural and scientific institutions in the former socialist Croatia, and met with strong political conviction. Croatian scholars, led by a constellation of distinguished linguists such as Dalibor Brozović, Stjepan Babić, Ljudevit Jonke, Tomislav Ladan, and many others, required that the official language in Croatia should carry the name of the nation and therefore it needed to be called the Croatian language. Shortly after that, in a response to the views expressed in the declaration, a group of Serbian writers published a 35 Željko Jozić pamphlet called “A proposal for consideration” (Predlog za razmišljanje) demanding the same level of independency for all languages in Yugoslavia. However, Bosnian political circles criticized the Croatian Declaration even before the Serbian writers did. The Bosnians were already much concerned about the Croatian-Serbian linguistic and terminological disputes. Specifically, the elite of Bosnian linguists felt they were losing ground because of the disintegration of the Serbo-Croatian language. Most of Croatian linguists claimed that the Serbo-Croatian language was the result of a linguistic and political compromise in the 20th century and it actually never existed as a common language of both nations: Croatian and Serbian. A claim like this would mean the evaporation of the language identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina where the language was called “the Bosnian variety of the Serbo-Croatian standard language.” It was a variety with (I)jekavian2 standard pronunciation, with a large number of Orientalisms and wide lexical and morphological variation, being a mixture of elements from the Croatian and Serbian languages. As early as the war year of 1993, the Sarajevo authorities released statutory provisions on language policy providing that “both the Serbo- Croatian and Croato-Serbian (I)jekavian language pronunciation is in official use in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina” (Službeni list republike BiH 1993a; my transl.). However, the law was changed only half a year later, and the authorities avoided naming the official language, which could be named Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian after any one of the three constituent nations: “The standard language with (I)jekavian pronunciation of the three constituent peoples which is called by one of three names: Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, should be in official use in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina” (Službeni list republike BiH 1993b; my transl.). In Croatia, language policy became an integral part of nation building. The consolidation of the specific characteristics of the Croatian language was brought about by going back to the roots of the Croatian language and drawing from its long tradition by resuscitating some archaic Croatian words, and by introducing some new ones. Serbia has also implemented a national language policy that has had nationalistic qualities (especially by promoting the Cyrillic alphabet as the only official script). These parallel 2 Proto-Slavic phoneme *ě has three main reflexes in the South Slavic linguistic area: (I)jekavian (-ije- in long syllables, -je- in short syllables), Ikavian and Ekavian, which means that examples like sěno and město can be pronounced sijeno, sino, seno, and mjesto, misto, mesto. 36 Linguistic (Un)reality in Contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina developments led to an even greater rift between the Serbian and Croatian standard languages. This linguistic nationalism has been part of the national turmoil in Bosnia. The change in the linguistic situation in Croatia and Serbia in the early 1990s affected Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the situation caused by the ethnic structure and the war was most complicated. The Bosniaks started to insist that their language should no longer be called the Bosnian variety of the standard language, nor was it Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian, but rather—the Bosnian language. We should now, however, look briefly at the centripetal forces characteristic of both the Croatian and Serbian communities in Bosnia, since in questions of language policy they have leaned heavily on the developments in Zagreb and Belgrade, respectively. From the very beginning of the war, standard Croatian as used in Croatia was introduced in the Croatian parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Most of the Croatian linguists and politicians thought that it was unacceptable to create a separate Bosnian Croatian standard language that would be different from the Croatian used in Croatia. However, there was some resistance to such thinking, especially in literary circles. Some Croatian linguists did try to point out the harmful effects of, for example, the low acceptance of the new or restored words (neologisms and archaisms), which were more or less unusual even for the Croats in Croatia, let alone the Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina. They warned about depriving the Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina of their rights to their own linguistic characteristics, meaning primarily the Orientalisms but also some similarities with the Serbian standard language. Serbian language policy in Bosnia and Herzegovina had its peculiarities, too, the primary concern having been the relationship between the Ekavian and (I)jekavian pronunciations.