Talk
like Us or Else-
Linguistic
Assimilation in former Yugoslvaia
by
Rey Irizarry
The
Croats and Serbs of former Yugoslavia have been at odds for a long time due to
historical events that put them at odds. Starting with the Byzantine Empire,
the Turkish rule, the Balkan Wars, WWI, and WWII, the region has always seemed
to be caught in the middle of nation state-building, nationalistic control, and
religious conflict. The central conflicting groups have been the Croats and
Serbs, which would lead to the Yugoslavian War in the 1990s. Both groups had
been oppressing the other, but the minority has little power against the
majority. The Croats were the majority and they intended to assimilate the
Serbs into their "more superior" nationalism. One method that they
used was linguistic assimilation.
Linguistic
assimilation is a tactic used in ethnic cleansing, which many times leads to
genocide. In "Fires of Hatred, Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century
Europe," author Norman M. Naimark points out that "the intention of
ethnic cleansing is to remove a people and often all traces of them from a
concrete territory" (Naimark 2001, p3). During the 19th century,
nationalism was on the rise and Croats and Serbs differed in their opinion of
languages. According to Birgitta Busch and Helen Kelly-Holmes, authors of
"Language, Discourse, and Borders in the Yugoslav Successor States,"
"On the Serbian side, Vuk Karadzic... under the influence of the
prevailing Romantic identification of languages with people, and dimly aware of
the three major dialect groups, had broadly assigned Cakavian to Croats,
Kajkavian to Slovenes, and Stokavian to Serbs. This symmetrical distribution...
made all Stokavian speakers (Orthodox, Catholic, and Mohammedan) appear as
Serbs" (2004, pg 25). On the Croatian side, during the Illyrian movement,
philologists and other inflential men created the Vienna Agreement essentially
stating that they were all the same and should speak a common language (Busch
and Kelly-Holmes 2004, pg 25). This marked the beginning of a Serbo-Croatian
language. As time went on more forceful measures were taken to assimilate the
Sebs, who realized the new language was not inherently equal and appealing to
the Serbs national identity. During WWII, it was the policy of the Croats to
force a third of the Serbs to convert to Catholicism, to deport a third, and
abolish the remaining Serbs. The Cyrillic alphabet was outlawed and many were
forced to use the Latin alphabet system that the Croats used.
It
has been the mission of many minorities to establish linguistic human rights in
their homeland. Often, many of the minority groups are faced with two major
framing challenges, utilitarian view of linguistic worth and the political
legacy of linguistic assimilation (Heidemann 2012). Many Croats used the
utilitarian view of linguistic worth to frame the linguistic human rights
movements in former Yugoslavia as pointless and backwards. "The
utilitarian view of linguistic worth posits that the value of a language rests
largely if not solely on the capacity of that language to promote
socio-economic mobility and opportunity.
The greater the capacity a language has for promoting material
advancement the more likely it is to be valorized and adopted by growing
numbers of individuals" (Heidemann 2012). With this definition in mind,
minority languages are deemed less useful because the languages are not
represented in the power structures. With former Yugoslavia in mind, the Serbs
wanted their language, alphabet, and in essence their identity to be
recognized, while the Croats tried to unify the language. The intent of
unifying the language meant that Croats saw the Serbian language as a step
backward and as an intentional depriving of their opportunity to acquire, as
Heidemann puts it, a "more useful language."
"Serbian
and Croatian language varieties have (re)emerged in the 1990s to replace
Serbo-Croat, itself the artificial 50 year language product of the Yugoslav Communist
Federation under Tito" (May 2004). In December 1991, the Croatian constitution
named Croatia over all the states and its minorities, but claimed to give
everyone the right to express their language (Karadjis, Link). The Serbs
continue to fight for linguistic human rights and fight against the utilitarian
view that put minority languages in opposition with the ideals of the majority.
Though, the Yugoslavian War has been over for about 3 decades, animosity still
looms near and history is not forgotten.
·
Busch, Birgitta and Kelly-Holmes, Helen. 2004. Language,
Discourse, and Borders in the Yugoslav Successor States. Multilingual
Matters.
·
Chronology for Serbs in Croatia. http://www.refworld.org/docid/469f387dc.html
·
Heidemann, Kai. 2012. Notes on the Ideological Challenges of Minority Language Activism. http://mobilizingideas.wordpress.com/2012/08/13/notes-on-the-ideological-challenges-of-minority-language-activism/#more-3011
·
Karadjis, Michael. National oppression and the collapse of Yugoslavia. http://links.org.au/node/166
·
May, Stephen. 2004. Language Rights and the Construction of the Minority Language.http://www.norrag.org/en/publications/norrag-news/online-version/language-politics-and-the-politics-of-language-in-education/detail/language-rights-and-the-construction-of-the-minority-language.html
