Declaration on the Common Language (Deklaracija o zajedničkom jeziku, 2017): Anti-nationalist Provocation, or a Reflection of Objective Reality?

Abstract

The language policy of the states in which Serbo-Croatian was the official language at the time has not always been the same either in the historical plan or in the present. From the first half of the 19th century until the establishment of the Yugoslav state (1918), a part of the Serbian and Croatian elites was characterized by a search for ways to find a mutually acceptable standard for their common written language. This process then continued under changed political conditions after 1918, but without romantic notions, especially on the part of the Croatian political and professional community. The rejection of the sociolinguistic project of a common written language with the Serbs manifested itself first during the Second World War (1941–45), then in the period 1967–71, and finally in the new Croatian Constitution of 1990. Linguistic issues related to the specifics of the language of Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina began to emerge in the late 1960s, but only came into full force after the break-up of the SFR Yugoslavia (1992). The four national communities using Serbo-Croatian (and then in a separate form Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin) during the Yugoslav era generated a total of seven declaratory texts with different scope, content, accents and conclusions between 1967 and 2007. All of them, however, were united by their linguistic nationalism – from moderate and rather defensive to radical and offensive. The eighth was the Declaration on a Common Language (2017), another decade later, the nature of which contradicts many of the postulates proclaimed in previous declaratory texts. This approach has been described by many critics as a marginal effort to return to Serbo-Croatian or even as a provocation that contradicts the relevant constitutional articles and that threatens national independence. The authors of the Declaration, however, point out that their declaration does not mandate anything, does not oblige anyone, does not discriminate against anyone, but tries to point out the obvious shortcomings of the existing language policy in the post-Serbo-Croatian space, which lead to linguistic segregation in schools and other unusual and even defective manifestations caused by the alleged otherness of the four written languages mentioned above. At the same time, they offer a relatively simple and appropriate model of how to understand and interpret the linguistic situation in the territory of the former Serbo-Croatian language, e.g. in the university teaching of Slavic studies.