The Croatian Language (CROSBI ID 67710)
Prilog u knjizi | izvorni znanstveni rad | međunarodna recenzija
Podaci o odgovornosti
Ham, Sanda
engleski
The Croatian Language
The history of the Croatian standard (literary) language is presented in the paper. Knowing the history of the Croatian language is needed to comprehend its current state not only as a linguistic phenomenon but also as a crucial component of the Croatian national identity. To Croats, language is its expression and the manifestation of intellectual and political freedom. It is a sensitive subject even nowadays. Croats’ sensitivity about Croatian emerges from their permanent resistance to attempted De-Croatization aiming at demonstrating that Croatian is not a distinct (socio)linguistic phenomenon. Battles for the Croatian language – many were fought – were also battles for Croatian freedom. A concise overview of the standardization of the Croatian language is presented, from the first Croatian grammar (1604) to the first Vukovian grammar (1899). The concept of vukovština [Vukovianism] and its devastating impact on Croatian is explained. The ideology of Vukovianism is based on a misapprehension that Shtokavian, the Croatian standard prestige dialect, is exclusively Serbian, so Croatian must be a constituent of the Serbian language. The Croatian literary language was developing independently until the state union with Serbs in 1918. From that moment till the formation of Banovina of Croatia (1939) and Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945), Croatian was subjected to unitaristic pressures and severe De-Croatization that peaked in Pravopisna uputstva (1929). These orthography directives erased the Croatian language characteristics, substituting them with Serbian ones. Ever since, the orthography has been a crucial linguistic and Croatian national issue. Yugoslavian language policy and planning after WW 2 (1945‒1991) was a continuation of the policy of unitarism and De-Croatization, now within the framework of communist ideology. The Novi Sad Agreement (1954) postulated that Croats and Serbs are one nation with one language (circular reasoning: they are one nation because they speak one language / they speak one language because they are one nation). Accordingly, a common orthography manual was published in 1960 followed by efforts to produce a (never finished) common dictionary. Simultaneously, to the world, an image was projected of the Serbian language being the sole public communication means. Croatian was ignored as well as Bosnian and Montenegrin – all three were presented as mere vernaculars, which was the source of contemporary foreign contestations of the Croatian language and related misconceptions. Croats responded to the pressure with the Declaration on the Status and Name of the Croatian Literary Language (1967) and a liberation movement called the Croatian Spring (1971). After the movement had been politically decapitated, the period of involuntary Croatian silence begun. Finally, in 1991, Croats won national sovereignty and the language, after one century, could develop independently again. However, the legacy of the past is still strong, especially widespread prejudices about Croatian—it is still internationally treated as the Serbo-Croatian, Shtokavian, or Western Variant of the Common Literary language. Unfortunately, politics still casts shadow on the Croatian language. In 2012, the successor of the former Communist Party came to power in Croatia, dismissed the Council for the Croatian Standard Language Codification, and, in 2013, made a political decision on orthography.
Croatian as a Slavic language ; Croatian language, history ; Croatian dialects ; Croatian scripts and orthography ; De-Croatization ; Croatian Spring, language ; language, differences between Croatian and Serbian ; Yugoslavia, unitaristic language policy
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Podaci o prilogu
79-134.
objavljeno
Podaci o knjizi
Croatia, Past, Present and Future Perspectives
Marušić, Matko
New York (NY): Nova Science Publishers
2020.
9781536183009