engleski

The Croatian Standard in the present social context: New attitudes and practices

Every language has two opposing functions: that of including and that of excluding. It links some speakers into a speech community and rejects others from that community, perhaps forming them into a different community. This holds for a standard and for any non-standard idiom, or vernacular, of a language. In view of their varying social statuses, some persons have less power while others have more, which can in turn be reflected in extra-linguistic reality. Standard speakers inhabit standard-language cultures whose attitudes toward languages take the existence of a standard as a given ; they create the ideology of standard languages. Since no standard, be it Croatian or any other, can as an explicitly norm-governed idiom, have any characteristics of a vernacular, the formation of a standard halts the vernacularisation of the space of public communication, however only temporarily. In the present new social context in particular types of discourse (poetry, media, politics, education and scholarship), we find a new vernacularisation of the Croatian standard with optional grammaticalisation. The Croatian standard remains intact in the discourse of law and public communication. In addition to a theoretical approach to this issue, the paper also explores the expansion and ubiquity of new vertical and horizontal idioms of the implicit norm in the space of public communication which just spreads through communicative practice, not through study and learning.

standard-language ideology, Croatian standard, non-standard idioms, (re)vernacularisation, public communication

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