Примењена лингвистика у част Ранку Бугарском - Језик у

Victor A. Friedman
UDK 81`27
FROM THE BALKANS TO BAHASA: COMPARATIVE
SOCIOLINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVES ON SOUTHEAST EUROPE
AND SOUTHEAST ASIA
Abstract. This article compares Southeast Europe and Southeast Asia from three
sociolinguistic perspectives: lexicon, labeling, and identity. The first perspective,
lexicon, provides the most obvious connection between two regions that are not
usually compared, but from two very different aspects. Thanks to Islam as a vehicle
of culture in both the Balkans and Southeast Asia, there is a considerable
amount of shared vocabulary at these two ends of the Islamic world. In the Balkans,
Arabic and Persian entered via Turkish, whereas in Southeast Asia, Arabic
entered directly but also via Persianisms in Indic. A very different type of comparable
vocabulary, however, is the field of shared discourse particles within the Balkan
sprachbund, on the one hand, and in multilingual states such as Indonesia, on
the other. Here it is precisely the colloquial, non-referential nature of shared discourse
particles that both attests to their speaker-to-speaker diffusion and creates a
sense of shared identity across linguistic boundaries in each of these regions. The
second perspective, naming, which is in a sense the opposite of non-referential
discourse particles, is also the purview of state formations. Here the phenomena
of Turkish-speaking ‘Muslim Greeks’ and Malay-speaking ‘Muslim Thais’ show
the same ethno-national ideologies at work. At the same time, the multiple names
of the former Serbo-Croatian and of the national realizations of Riau-Johor Malay
show the context-dependency of ‘language’. Finally, the third perspective compares
colonial and imperial constructs of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ and the attempts to
translate these into ethnic and civic identities. The article conlcudes with the hope
that it will encourage further investigation of these two Southeasts.
Keywords: Sprachbund, Malay, language contact, Islam, Arabic, Turkish, Slavic,
identity
1. Ranko Bugarski has contributed enormously to our understanding of language
standardization (e.g., Bugarski 1992, 2004), language deployment (e.g., Bugarski
1995, 2001), and sociolinguistics in general. His works on the languages of what
is now former Yugoslavia have stood the test of time, and I use them regularly
in my own research, lecturing, and classes. In this contribution honoring Ranko
Bugarski’s distinguished career, I would like to turn our attention to a comparison
55