Serbian language Part 1

In order to strengthen their identity, Croats insist on promoting a national language more and more distinct from the Serbian-Croatian encouraged by Yugoslavist. But Serbs and Croats continue to understand each other perfectly in 'their language'.


SERBIAN - CROATIAN OR CROATIAN - SERBIAN, THE USE OF LANGUAGE GEOPOLITICAL.

Part 1.

Two languages or one? A language a nation, or language two nations? All these questions are resolved in a single question: what is the main feature of the national identity of Serbs and Croats?

In the nineteenth century, in intellectual circles in Zagreb was born under the influence of the Renaissance European Illyrian movement, led by Ljudevit Gaj. The movement arose to counter the dominance of the culture of Hungarian and Austrian Slav, aimed to promote cultural unity, but, ultimately, the political unity of the South Slavs The claim of the unity of the southern Slavs stemmed from the realization that only with the creation of a State sudslavo would be possible to defend the interests of the peoples of the expansionist intentions of the powers surrounding. The ideal unit rested on the belief that language is the foundation of national identity. On this basis, that is, the belief that Serbs and Croats speak the same language and therefore are one people, Ljudevit Gaj, leader of the Risorgimento movement Croatian, chose as the standard language Croatian dialect spoken by Croats in Herzegovina, the region where the mode to speak of Croats did not differ from that of the local Serbs. In fact, in Herzegovina, Serbs and Croats speak using the dialect and pronunciation štokavo ijekava. The štokavo is the general characteristic of the dialect (in this case a dialect that has become a literary language) as the interrogative pronoun "that" is expressed by the word "am"; ijekavo is the characteristic that refers to the pronunciation of vowels sun. Even in Belgrade, for example, using the štokavo, however, not the pronunciation ijekava but that ekava.

A few decades before Gaj, Serbia, Vuk Stefanović Karadzic reformed the Cyrillic alphabet and spelling formulated the fundamental rule of the Serbo-Croat language: "Write as you speak and read as it is written."

The idea that the fundamental elements of a nation are in the first language, and then, the customs, the base of which are natural and environmental factors and geographical-climatic, is derived Herderian. In fact, according to Johann Gottfried Herder primacy in the formation of a nation lies with the language, because only through it can pass customs and traditions from one generation to another. For Herder, "is the language that establishes the laws and ties the races," so that the language "is imprinted on the mind and character of a people. Again, "the essence of the nation is not race," the blood "(because it breeds, stirring everywhere, are an arbitrary allocation), but it contains the modes of acculturation (language, religion, forms of cohabitation, costumes)
The main weakness of the conception Herderian was that it was a vision of the nation-historical, that is essentially apolitical. Besides, it was only logical that in Croatia backward and politically submissive, in particular Hungary and then Austria, the first instances of emancipation were presented in the form of reflections on cultural issues. In complete absence of a history and a tradition of its own policy, the only place where you could do for those few intellectuals Croats and Serbs soaked Risorgimento ideals learned in the course of their studies in European universities, was obviously the 'sphere of culture. They then find the thought of Herder a particularly fertile soil and suitable for their purposes, cultural and ultimately geopolitical.

The fact that in the Balkans, more than elsewhere, the national revival comes out of the magic hat of culture and mimetizzi continuously as a cultural phenomenon, it is understandable if you think centuries of absence of any kind of unitary state populations sudslave. That their absence has precluded any possibility of reflection and empirical evidence on the role of the state in the creation of national identity. It also prevented the culture formed a uniform policy of the Serbs and the Croats. So the cultural commitment has been for centuries, in Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, the only way to do politics. Discuss the language of Croats and Serbs, therefore, means addressing an academic or purely cultural, but to intervene in a political and geopolitical notch.