Is Serbian becoming Croatian?

Abstract

The paper investigates how nationalism (which flourished since the disintegration of Yugoslavia) and Serbo-Croatian language unity is instrumentalised to block the debates on sexist language in Serbia. Serbian feminists criticise current language practices as being sexist by making women linguistically invisible or rather exclusively visible in stereotypical contexts with only little social prestige. They challenge the supposedly gender-neutrality of so called ‘masculine generics’ and demand a consistent use of gender-specific forms for females. On the contrary, traditional Serbian linguists deny any discriminatory language patterns claiming that nouns for males can be used for females as well because of the ‘nature’ or ‘spirit’ of the Serbian language. Beside those arguments known from similar debates which have been held for other languages, the Serbian anti-feminist discourses on gender and language are even specific: Several gender-specific female nouns are found not to be Serbian but Croatian and should therefore not be used in Serbia. The proposals of feminists for non-sexist language are even accused of endangering Serbian national integrity by turning the Serbian language into Croatian – ignoring the fact that Serbian and Croatian share most of their lexicon being successor languages of Serbo-Croatian.