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Croatian and Serbian : A tale of two languages and their hierarchies

Croatian and Serbian : A tale of two languages and their hierarchies One would wonder why thirty years after the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, the construct of the so-called “Serbo-Croatian language” still persists within the academy and the wider Western world. The linguonym itself (name of the language) initially was created by group of linguists and historians within communities at the end of the 19th century, with an aim to bring closer the South Slavic peoples that for centuries lived without closer direct contact within different empires: Croats under the Habsburgs, Serbs within the Ottoman Empire. The project of “Serbo-Croatian” failed since in the later established federal state of Yugoslavia a linguistic policy of hegemonic Serbian politics was used to impose a unitary state, through it was just one of four official languages of former Yugoslavia (including “Croato-Serbian”, Slovenian and Macedonian). Therefore, one may wonder why 70 years of official "Serbo-Croatian" within Yugoslavia is more important than one thousand years of literary practice in Croatian, which in its present form was largely standardized by the mid-18th century. Contrary to a much shorter written tradition in Serbian vernacular which had been standardized only by the end of the 19th century. This distinct identity of Croatian language was subsumed under ‘Serbo-Croatian’, which often appropriated the literary canon of Croatian. Those two closely related south Slavic languages, had a distinct life for centuries, evolving within a separate historical framework, put together for political expediency. Although that “language” has never been a linguistic reality, after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, a predominant view has persisted that one language has split into two. In reality, those two languages have again their distinct lives and Croatian is nowadays one of the official languages of the EU.

Croatian language, language standardization, South Slavic languages, language policy

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