(University of Zagreb, Croatia, Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics)
(tstojan@gmail.com)
Debates on the status of the Serbo-Croatian pluricentric language have a long history, not just in the countries of former Yugoslavia, but worldwide. This question often carries the burden of an ultimate ideological filter among their speakers. In this paper, we attempt to shed light on the cultural, religious, and socio-political aspects of the first codification of vernacular languages among the South Slavs during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries under the Illyrian linguonym. Two historical tendencies – language hybridization and explicit integrational language ideology – support our research of the historical aspects of pluricentrism in Illyrian. The opposing evidence – consisting of language separation and explicit disintegrational language ideology – led to the disintegration of the Serbo-Croatian in ex-Yugoslavia. In this study, these tendencies will be described and supported by some new evidence of historical pluricentrism, especially in the very last period of the communist regime, in a unitaristic effort of preserving the pluricentric linguonym (i.e., hrvatski ili srpski [Croatian or Serbian]) in the Constitution of the Socialistic Republic of Croatia. Due to its recentness, the circumstances of this final act of Serbo-Croatian pluricentric disintegration have been only vaguely historiographically described – the only relevant source of information so far was Babic (1990). The evolution from the Illyrian to the Serbo-Croatian linguonym and pluricentric language that lasted more than four centuries, and its ultimate disintegration at the end of the twentieth century, reveals similar patterns of the role of identity and ideology in the standardization aspects of pluricentric languages.
Babic, Stjepan. 1990. Hrvatski jezik u politickom vrtlogu [Croatian in the political whirl]. Zagreb: dr Ante Pelivan i Danica Pelivan