Abstract
Although the break-up of Yugoslavia has spawned an enormous literature in many fields, Language Issues in former Yugoslav Space: Current Perspectives (Aegean Working Papers in Ethnographic Linguistics Vol. 2, No. 1), 2018 ed. by Roswitha Kersten-Pejanić (general ed. Costas Canakis), is a welcome assessment of some aspects of the current state of affairs from an ethnolinguistic standpoint. The varied articles in this volume each deserve individual attention, and thus my remarks address the articles separately. [...]
Highlights
The spelling Kosov@, which combines the Serbian form Kosovo with the Albanian definite form Kosova, is a sort of acronym that many of us used during the 1991-2008 period, when Kosovo's status was contested in what the international community called — after the coming into force of UNSCR 1244 in 1999 — “constructive ambiguity”
It is the case that Kosovo is accepted as the English-language designation of the independent state, while Kosov@ refers to the pre-independence state of ambiguity or, perhaps, to Serbia’s refusal to recognize Kosovo’s independence
KerstenPejanić refers to “Croatia’s open and energetic efforts to quickly establish its own standard language” and states that none of the other ex-Yu republics “have been inactive when it comes to the macro-level of nationalist language policies.”
Summary
The implementation of the Montenegrin and Macedonian standard languages by Christian Voß. 8-9, concerning the events and policies 1952-1956, Voß writes that they “influenced the early stage of status planning in Skopje by the simple reproach of it being a Serbian variety”, but this claim misses the fact that the Bulgarians began hurling that accusation the very same year that the Tito-Stalin break occurred in 1948 (Koneski 1948) It is unclear how Bulgaria’s specious claims influenced Macedonian language planning. At the end of that paragraph, Voß writes: “The new standard as codified in 2009 has not been accepted by all of its potential speakers, so that the ultimate nature and status of the Montenegrin language remains an unresolved issue.” This is clearly quite different from standard Macedonian, which, a decade after the first codification conference of 1944 had already produced an academic grammar in the language, a modest orthographic dictionary, four years of an academic journal (Makedonski jazik), and a generation educated in the standard language, including five published B. It may well be that the signatories to the “Deklaracija o zajedničkom jeziku” (declaration of a common language) are politically naïve, but dialectologically, they have a point
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