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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5274 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes  Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 25 of 53 05 October 2010 at 5:08am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Which proves nothing, since refugees from inland could have imposed their language on the Dubrovnik littoral. That in fact is the likely scenario, given certain pre-Eastern Herzegovina forms in the Dubrovnik version of that dialect. Moreover, in the 19th century, many of Dubrovnik's most prominent families and individuals considered themselves Serb Catholics ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbs_in_Dubrovnik ). Irrelevant to the discussion entirely.
I wonder how much of their tolerance stemmed from genuine love of the pan-Yugoslav ideal and how much from self-interest in not having Dalmatia be annexed to Italy during Il Risorgimento. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5274 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 26 of 53 05 October 2010 at 5:12am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Perhaps I was not clear. The language spoken in Zagreb is highly influenced by Kajkavian, which deviates it significantly from the literary language, which is also the prestige language. Just like the language of Rome differs from the preferred Tuscan standard. Croatian dialects 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6944 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 27 of 53 05 October 2010 at 5:43am | IP Logged | ||||||||
You said, "Zagreb and the rest of Croatia", but his map shows 3 dialect regions, one of which is presumably the "proper" Croatian. Also, what do the educated classes speak in those various regions, the local dialect, or something in-between the dialect and the "standard" language?
Do learners of Italian diligently avoid Rome for that reason? Should they be advised to? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5274 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 28 of 53 05 October 2010 at 5:53am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I will try to deal with this in as systematic a fashion as possible. 1.) If we take ex-Yugoslavia as a whole, we could say that there were 6 natively spoken South Slavic languages in the area (neglecting the Bulgarian minority). They can be grouped into: i.) Two clearly non-"Serbo-Croatian" languages. These would be at least Macedonian and Slovenian. Slovenian is clearly a distinct language and that is not under dispute anywhere. Macedonian may be considered as a separate language or as a dialect of Bulgarian that bears some Serbian influences. Again, that's up to the linguists to decide. From listening to Macedonians speak, it is clearly not Serbian and my Bulgarian friend tells me he understands them, so you can draw your own conclusion. 2.) Two transitional languages. In Croatia, the transitional language is Kajkavian, which is one of the three Croatian languages. None are mutually intelligible amongst each other. However, Kajkavian, which is spoken in northwestern Croatia, exhibits many features common with Slovenian and it could be argued represents a transition between Slovenian and "Croato-Serbian." Kajkavian In Serbia, the transitional language is Torlakian, which is one of the two Serbian languages. Spoken in southeastern Serbia, it is not mutually intelligible with standard Serbian, and it exhibits many features of Bulgarian, so it could be argued that it represents a transition between "Serbo-Croatian" and Bulgarian. Whether Torlakian is an extreme form of Serbian or closer to Bulgarian is controversial but it clearly is transitional between the two. Torlakian 3.) The Cakavian language of Croatia. This language is uniquely spoken in Croatia and almost entirely by Croats. It is the quintessential Croat language. Cakavian 4.) The last and largest of the ex-Yugoslav languages is Stokavian. This is what is commonly called "Serbo- Croatian." It is spoken in large parts of Croatia, the vast majority of Serbia, all of Montenegro, and all of Bosnia. It does contain multiple dialects, but these are mutually intelligible. Thus, it represents one language. The literary standard of the language is the Eastern Herzegovinian dialect. It originates, as the name implies, in Eastern Herzegovina from a Serb political principality called Zahumlje or Hum. It penetrated in a very coherent fashion into the Dubrovnik littoral, into Montenegro, into the Drina River valley and western Serbia, and in a more scattered fashion into northern and western Bosnia, Slavonia, the Dalmatian hinterland (Zagora) and Gorski Kotar regions of Croatia. Its rapid and widespread movement was mobilized by the collapse of Hum due to the arrival of the Ottoman Turks, and either the more voluntary movement of these people as serfs of Muslim landlords or flight as refugees from religious repression into Christian Austria-Hungary. Stokavian (i.e. Serbo-Croatian) 5.) It is this last language, the one spoken by the most people natively, that is under dispute. I personally do not believe that politics can determine what a language is or is not. Argentinians and Chileans, no matter how much they may or may not hate Spain, speak Spanish - not Argentine or Chilean. As such, since it so hard for the nationalists in the region to come upon a common name, I would favor calling it Stokavian. If the language does evolve and diverge into truly different languages, then so be it. That is normal and an expected phenomenon in history. On the other hand, artificial engineering of new languages to suit political agendas is not something I can support, nor the theft of other peoples' cultures and languages. A Montenegrin language is a fiction and a joke. What we are talking about here has nothing to do with real languages and everything to do with inferiority complexes and petty nationalism. From wikipedia: Montenegrin language In the previous census of 1991, the vast majority of Montenegrin citizens, 510,320 or 82.97%, declared themselves as speakers of the then official language: Serbo-Croatian. The 1981 population census also recorded a Serbo-Croat-speaking majority. However in the first Communist censuses, the vast majority of the population declared Serbian their native tongue. Such is also the case with the first recorded population census in Montenegro, in 1909, when approximately 95% of the population of the Princedom of Montenegro declared Serbian their native language. The most recent population census conducted in Montenegro was in 2003, when it was still in its state union with Serbia. According to it, 144,838 citizens or 21.53% of the population declared "Montenegrin" their native language. and In 2003 401,382 or 59.67% of Montenegrin citizens declared the official Serbian their native tongue, the final published figure was 393,740 or 63.49% of the total population. The following is the speakers' statistics: 197,684 Serbs (50.21%) 156,374 Montenegrins (39.72%) 8,696 Slavic Muslims (2.21%) 2,723 Bosniacs (0.69%) 2,529 Croats (0.64%) 1,705 Yugoslavs (0.43%) 24,029 others (6.1%) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5274 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 29 of 53 05 October 2010 at 6:04am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Then I mispoke. There is no "proper" Croatian. There are three languages spoken in Croatia. Two of them are spoken exclusively by Croats. The third (Stokavian) was historically spoken natively both by Croats and the Serb minority. All are valid as Croatian languages. The Croatian standard language taught in schools is based on a dialect of Stokavian, the Eastern Herzegovinian dialect. This dialect originated outside of Croatia and was brought into Croatia during the Ottoman occupation of Europe. If you wish to learn the literary standard of Croatia, you should learn this dialect, not the Zagreb speech. In Zagreb, you will hear a mostly Stokavian language which has many influences from the outlying Kajkavian region. Nothing terrible about that, but it's like learning standard Italian by immersing yourself in Palermo. In response to your second question, and I'm starting to doubt its honesty, I can only say that I'd rather learn French in Paris than in Occitania. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6944 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 30 of 53 05 October 2010 at 6:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||
The honesty of the question would depend on the degree of divergence between the dialect and the "standard" language, and how much the true dialect is really alive - linguists can exaggerate things that aren't much of a big deal in practice, although that's not to say the differences can't be substantial in some cases. I hear different things about Zagreb. On another note, I still don't understand why the right place to learn standard Croatian is outside Croatia, which is what your earlier post unequivocally stated. Perhaps you just misspoke in the way you phrased that particular comment, but as written, that's what it said. Edited by frenkeld on 05 October 2010 at 7:29am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 31 of 53 05 October 2010 at 6:44am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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The irony of the rise of Montenegrin as something separate from Serbian (and ensuing confusion for foreigners wishing to learn languages of the former Yugoslavia) was that Montenegrin got a big boost from Serbian nationalism in addition to Balkan nationalist logic. The Balkan nationalist logic held that if Bosnians, Croats, Montenegrins and Serbs consider themselves to be distinct ethnic groups, then there will be as many languages as ethnic groups even if the variants used are effectively fully mutually intelligible and based on / codified using the same sub-dialect.
As I understand it, most Montenegrins appeared to be indifferent to the language question until the 1990s when nationalism re-emerged. Despite Serbs' traditional attachment to Montenegro, Serbian nationalism provided a noticeable boost to Montenegrin separatists when emphasizing their difference from Serbs. The linguistic problem arose when Serbian academics in the late 1980s and 1990s seriously considered elevating Ekavian Serbian (i.e. a sub-dialect of Shtokavian from northern Serbia and Belgrade) over Ijekavian Serbian (i.e. Serbian as codified on Eastern Herzegovinian and the variant which is nearly identical to standard Bosnian and standard Croatian, in addition to being what Montenegrins have treated as their standard). This thinking by the academics was motivated by some nationalist idea that the Serbs needed to unify in as many ways as possible in a time of war, even if it meant officially deprecating one variant/dialect over another. The problem was that it irritated some Serbs who weren't native speakers of the "correct" variant (Ekavian Serbian). In other words Serbs in southwestern Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia and Montenegro were tacitly considered to be talking "improperly" in Ijekavian unlike their illustrious cousins in Belgrade who used Ekavian. Montenegrin separatists seized on this short-sighted attempt at linguistic unity as Belgrade's attempt to erase Montenegro's distinctiveness since most Montenegrins have used Ijekavian Serbian / Ijekavian Serbo-Croatian as their native standard. Now what we have is the striking (or arguably absurd) situation (especially for speakers of pluricentric languages such as English, French, German, Portuguese or Spanish) where suddenly where there was one language (Serbo-Croatian) is nominally four languages. While few would argue that Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian (and eventually Montenegrin) represent different STANDARD languages, it's much less defensible to hold them as representations of different languages (i.e. less than fully mutually intelligible communicative codes) without invoking political or sociolinguistic judgments 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5274 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 32 of 53 05 October 2010 at 7:02am | IP Logged | ||||||||
My impression is rather different. Of all the ex-Yugoslav space, Serbia proper has been the least obsessed with language issues, keeping the name "Serbo-Croatian" for longer periods of time than others, using freely both Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, and not going on any particular linguistic campaign that might have been imagined in the context of war (e.g. Ottoman-origin words are still freely used for all sorts of terms, e.g. the words for corner, stale, soup, and pickle). I don't know of any Ottoman, Hungarian, German, or any other "unfriendly" words being purged from the language, nor do I know of the artificial fabrication of vocabulary from Church Slavonic either. In contrast, the language took a very natural turn after 1991 and simply continued along its old trajectory. Contrast that with the situation in Bosnia, in which Arabic, Persian, and Turkish words that never existed in the language are being dragged in, and "h" sounds are being thrown in where they never were before. Or Croatia, where practically every word that faintly smells of "Serbisms," and much from other languages, even many Western European ones, is systematically purged and replaced with a (frequently bizarre) calque. One insanely stupid example is how "vjerovatno" (probably) became "vjerojatno." When my father was living in Zagreb (for more than 15 years as a boy and young man) he had never heard the word "vjerojatno" nor is its etymology clear. "Vjerovatno" clearly comes for the verb for believing but "vjerojatno"?!? But of course, they do say "vjerovati" for the verb. So they keep the infinitive but kill the adverb. Well, I'll leave that to the Croatian linguists to explain... ;) Or independent is now "neovisno" whereas "Nezavisna" is an evil "Serbism." Hmm... ;) Now, I did hear that there were some moronic attempts of nationalists in Bosnia to make Bosnian Serbs speak ekavian, which is quite simply bizarre and stupid. But assuredly the idea never came from Serbia, nor has Serbian society ever considered ekavian "real Serbian" and ijekavian "not Serbian." The Serbian Bible, in fact, is in ijekavian. I don't know anything about the Montenegrin situation at all. My suspicion is that there has always been a rather small but firm core Montenegrin identity centered around Cetinje and that it is being disproportionately promulgated by the Montenegrin authorities so as to somehow "forge a nation." The 2003 poll shows that most Montenegrins haven't latched onto these Montenegrin language or Montenegrin Orthodox church concepts, but I expect that that will change over time as new textbooks are printed, alphabets are fabricated, monasteries are confiscated, etc. by the Montenegrin authorities. Give a few decades and they'll be hating each other just like all the rest of them. Truth be told, most Serbian Serbs were also getting a bit tired of having Montenegrins constantly harp about their heroism, honor, racial purity, and bravery, while running off to Belgrade to get their higher education and disproportionately dominating Serbian politics (I needn't remind you of the birthplace of a certain former Bosnian Serb leader and the family home of a certain other deceased Serbian/Yugoslav leader ;) ). Edited by Merv on 05 October 2010 at 7:24am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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