Part 2 - 3

Part 2.

If the Serb-Croat and one or two languages ​​has remained until today one of the most debated political issue. The ideal unit of the peoples of the South Slavs, Yugoslavia, based on the assumption that the language of the Serbs and Croats should be one. Consequently, the primary task of every separatist nationalism was, and is, to prove that they are two very different languages.

The fact that immediately distinguishes the Serbian and Croatian is that the first is written, as well as in the Latin alphabet, also in Cyrillic. On the other hand, if you let slide the historical memory will remember that the Croats throughout the Middle Ages wrote in Glagolitic, essentially a variant of the Cyrillic old. To realize just visit some late medieval Croatian Catholic Church. There are even some words written with the Cyrillic alphabet of Serbia have the same graphic form if they were written with the Latin alphabet and of course have the same meaning and pronunciation in both Serbian and Croatian language, such as the words jaje (egg ), ja (I), moj (mine), mak (poppy), oko (eye), kao (as), je (is), mama (mother), TATA (Dad, written in capital letters) and so on. So it is even possible to build a few short phrases that are spelled in the same way in Serbian Cyrillic alphabet is Latin Croatian, such as the phrase "Moja mama je kao ja jaka" ("My mother is as strong as me.") In fact, the letters a, e, j, o, m, k, and T (if written in capital letters), are written in the same way in the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabet.

The second difference in the mode of expression of Serbs and Croats, as already noted, is that the Serbs and Croats speak ekavo ijekavo. These are two variants of pronunciations that stand in the way in which they express the vowels: the Serbs for example for the word milk say mleko and Croats mlijeko. However, it is a difference that affects more the standard of literary language that the linguistic substance.

In some regions of the former Yugoslavia is easy to find Serbs who speak ijekavo (especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina), as there are Croats who speak ekavo (eg in the vicinity of Zagreb).

Since many Serbs speak ijekavo, in the late Ante Starčević - the father of Croatian nationalism or anti-Serb as Franjo Tudjman called father of the nation - wrote his works in ekavo. In his view the majority of Serbs spoke ijekavo and thus to distinguish them from the Croats were to adopt the standard of pronunciation ekava. The irony of history has meant that, according to a nationalist logic, the works of the father of today prove almost all written in a foreign language.

There are in fact differences between Serbian and Croatian, but no more than that between dialects of the same language. This is different due to the different historical development of the Croatian-Serbian language has had in different regions. The Serbian language, as well as its standard, is full of words of Turkish origin, while the standard Croatian has been purged of foreign words, as they have always considered them to be an element foreign to the spirit of the language.

The way of speaking of Serbs, Croats and Muslims in Bosnia, especially in those regions where the three populations lived together until yesterday, is the same. It is therefore impossible to distinguish on the basis of language. The only way to determine if it is of Serbs, Croats and Muslims is to classify them on the basis of religion.


Part 3.

 The creation of a language, as well as the creation of a nation, is a process which contributes a plurality of causes. Serbs and Croats have been exposed to the influence of different religions and different cultures, therefore, the Christian East and the Christian West. You can also find on the limes that divides East from West, crushed by the encounter of different ideas and geopolitical interests. For this they have developed special characters. But the differences are not such as to divide them into two teams ethnically different. So much so that sometimes we find major differences between Croats of two different regions, such as between Bosnian Croats and Croatian Zagorje (north-west of Zagreb Croatia and Slovenia) or between Serbs of two different regions, such as between the Serbs of Croatia and Serbs Šumadija (region of central Serbia), which between Croats and Serbs in the same region, for example, between Serbs and Croats in Herzegovina.

The idea of ​​a unitary language Serbian-Croatian was the basis of the ideology of brotherhood and unity in the socialist Yugoslavia. According to this view, Serbs and Croats, despite their differences, the two peoples are brothers, one race in a nutshell that occupies a unique geopolitical space, the Western Balkans, but that history had divided creating two teams ethnically similar. In fact, the first statement on the language and the spelling of 1954, known as the agreements Novi Sad, intellectuals and writers Serbs and Croats declared that "the popular language of Serbs, Croats and Montenegrins is a single language. For this reason, the language of literature that has developed on the basis of it around the two major centers, Belgrade and Zagreb, is a single language with two pronunciations, the ekava and ijekava. In short, the ideologists of Tito claimed that one single language with two variants, the Serbian and Croatian ekava ijekava, of equal value. To quote the words of Miroslav Krleža, the most important Croatian writer and, with Ivo Andric, Yugoslav, "Croatian and Serbian are one language. The Croats call it Croatian Serbs of Serbia. "

During the Yugoslav affair, many of the intellectuals who had signed the agreements Novi Sad changed several times its opinion with respect to the language issue. You could make a long list of intellectuals, both Serbs and Croats, who have never heard contradict themselves by saying that Serbian and Croatian are one language, to support with equal firmness, only a few decades later, that there were two different languages. It almost did not realize that while fighting each other they understood perfectly!

Given the similar, if not equality, between Serbian and Croatian, the Croatian nationalists (but not only them!) Were always worried to try the difference between Serbian and Croatian, even at the cost of inventing it. This great work of imagination had its highest expression in the nineties during the rule of the party HDZ, which during the presidency of Franjo Tudjman. In fact, if Tudjman had an obsession, this was the continuous invention of new / old words and nell'autarchia Croatian language. It got to the point that the last book of President Tudjman has a title "Croatian so" that is almost incomprehensible to a Croat.

The continuous invention of words that did not exist or were no longer used for decades in the current Croatia before 1991, and therefore the continued use phrases that distinguished Croatian from Serbian and were served up to the people through television and the press, is undoubtedly the more particular marker of the cultural policy of the presidency of Franjo Tudjman. Of course, the first manifestation of linguistic self-sufficiency in the history of Croatia dates back to the period of the Independent State of Croatia Ante Pavelić established by the governments of the Axis forces during World War II. But Tudjman in the invention of new words has reached absolute peaks. It seemed that all Croats were to go back to school to speak and write their own language correctly. It has even been seriously debated whether to introduce the etymological spelling, thus repudiating the common approach to the Serbian and Croatian introduced by Vuk S. Karadzic. The (unspoken) word was autarky language. The intent was to highlight the national and cultural identity Croatian highlighting the differences from the Serb. This trend has had applied to the tongue sometimes landings so absurd as to produce a quantity of jokes neo-croatismi.