“The Declaration on the Common Language”: A View from the Inside

Ranko Bugarski

doi:10.12681/awpel.22595

Abstract

The editor of the special issue of AWPEL on former Yugoslavia has kindly invited me to provide the journal’s readership with more information on this document, evaluated in distinctly negative terms by Professor Christian Voß in his contribution to the present collection of articles. I will gladly do so, in my capacity as a native speaker of Serbo-Croatian, a consultant in the drafting process of the Declaration and one of its initial signatories and public supporters. [...]

Highlights

The Declaration came into being as a result of a year-long regional project called “Jezici i nacionalizmi” [Languages and nationalisms], originally inspired by an influential book by the well-known Croatian linguist Snježana Kordić (2010)
Motives This initiative was motivated by the widespread perception that there was little correspondence between the strictly separatist language and identity policies followed by the authorities in all the four countries and linguistic reality on the ground, where many speakers of the officially recognized four national languages consider that the often artificial differentiation among them has gone too far, and that they still speak basically the same language under different names
The Declaration was conceived as a well-meaning grass-roots, bottom-up initiative by a representative group of concerned intellectuals with little else in common and with no executive power or political backing, contrary to accusations routinely made by its vociferous opponents. It has no hidden agendas or pretentions; least of all does it aim for a restoration of Yugoslavia under Serbian dominance, or for the official abandonment of the four national language names in favour of a revived common Serbo-Croatian

Summary

Introduction

1. Background The Declaration came into being as a result of a year-long regional project called “Jezici i nacionalizmi” [Languages and nationalisms], originally inspired by an influential book by the well-known Croatian linguist Snježana Kordić (2010). Within this project a series of four conferences were held in the course of 2016, in Podgorica, Split, Belgrade, and Sarajevo, each featuring a mixed panel of invited language professionals (noted linguists, writers, journalists, critics, translators, etc.) bringing up and discussing with the highly responsive audiences a large variety of topics relating to linguistic issues and problems.

Results

Conclusion