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Language biographies in the research on personal and social cognition of national and transnational integration processes

The ideology of the mid-19th century Illyrian movement in north-western Croatia had one national and several transnational unification aspects. The national aspect was aimed at the political unification of the Croatian territories and at their economic independence. The transnational aspect implied the cultural and linguistic unification of South-Slavic peoples, as well as all Slavs. The concept of the Croatian nation as a functional part of the Habsburg monarchy also sporadically appears in discourses of the members of the Illyrian movement. These diverse projections of identity are reflected in the concept of the supra-regional standard language intended to serve not only as an instrument of unification of Croatian ethnic groups, but also of a broader unification. At the beginning of the movement, the Croatian, South-Slavic and Pan-Slavic idea formed a constituent part of the Croatian national ideology. The understanding of the personal and social cognition on these identification processes represents the starting point for understanding the later integration processes in the region. The national identification processes which led to the independence of Croatia in the 1990-ies, as well as the current croatian public issue on joining the European Union can be seen as the reflection of the 19th century political and social processes, although they manifest only a part of the former national ideology. This paper compares the public-sphere and private-sphere texts of members of the Illyrian movement. The corpus consists of published programmatic documents, press articles, political speeches, and handwritten texts created between 1832 and 1848 in Croatian and German. Qualitative content analysis was applied to reconstruct the political and ideological fundaments of the language concept and the causes of variations in public and private discourses regarding national unification and standardisation processes. The analysis focused on texts as manifestations of the national ideology model, i.e. as creative narrative processes presenting one’s own language behaviour and the social language reality. The identified narratives and language identity acts were compared to the topics of the current public debate on joining the EU. Our analysis has shown that the Illyrian ideology, which used the supra-regional language as a medium of national unification, was strongly affected, among other things, by the ideologies of other Slavic peoples in the Monarchy. The following characteristics of context models (Van Dijk, 2008) were identified as relevant factors of discourse variation: definition of the opportunity or adversity of the current political, the perception of the positive or negative recipient attitude and the positioning of the author’s own role in the communicative situation The social multilingualism in which the national language gained prestige over time has indirectly influenced the discourse of narrative autobiographical constructions. Discourse variations on a diachronic level were observed in private-sphere texts, since these texts reveal autobiographical processes of changes in personal cultural and linguistic positions (Treichel, 2004). Treichel, B. (2004): Identitätsarbeit, Sprachbiographien und Mehrsprachigkeit. Autobiographisch-narrative Interviews mit Walisern zur sprachlichen Figuration von Identität und Gesellschaft ; Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2004 Van Dijk, Teun A. (2008): Discourse and Context. A Sociocognitive Approach, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008

Language biographies; Illyrian movement; national language

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