engleski

„Deklaracija o nazivu i položaju hrvatskog književnog jezika“ Compared with „Tézy o slovenčine“

This paper compares, from a sociolinguistic point of view, two contemporary documents, one on the socio-political status of the Croatian language and the other on that of the Slovak language, in their respective socialist federal states. Special attention is paid to the comparison of the Croatian and Slovak language situations and to the specific features of the Yugoslav and Czechoslovak language policies in the 1960s. The unitary concept of the two- variant Czechoslovak language used in the 1920s and 1930s, which actually implied a linguistic asymmetry in practice, was replaced in the post-war socio-political context by the idea that the Czech and Slovak languages were gradually converging. The climax of Slovak philological resistance to this program was represented in Jozef Ružička’s “Tézy o slovenčine” [Theses on the Slovak language]. By means of a model of variants (which Slovak and Czech philology had abandoned much earlier), in the 1960s much effort was put into defending the distinctiveness of the Croatian “variant” within the unitarian Serbo-Croatian language project. It was in this specifically Croatian context that the text “Deklaracija o nazivu i položaju hrvatskog književnog jezika” [Declaration on the name and position of the Croatian literary language] was created. In many ways, it was compliant with Ružicka’s “Tézy o slovenčine”. This paper compares legal provisions on the Croatian and Slovak languages that were drawn up subsequent to the above- mentioned documents, as well as their application in public life and the dynamics of language standardization, which came later.

Croatian language ; Slovak language ; language policy ; 1960s

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