Примењена лингвистика у част Ранку Бугарском - Језик у

JEZIK U UPOTREBI / LANGUAGE IN USE
By using the unmodified name Bahasa without a qualification, the taxi-driver
was both acknowledging the commonality of the different national languages
and avoiding any national specification. The situation can be compared to the
use of naš jezik ‘our language’ in former Yugoslavia, to avoid the complexities
of Serbo-Croatian, Croato-Serbian, Serbian, or Croatian (and now also Bosnian
and Montenegrin), all of which were originally based on the dialect of Tršić in
southwestern Serbia. 23
3. This brings us to issues of language and identity. In the case of Malay, the
colonial experience divided the language between British and Dutch spheres. In
the case of South Slavic, the imperial spheres were Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman
Turkish. In the British sphere Malay was both a majority language and
a lingua franca, whereas in the Dutch sphere it was a lingua franca. But in both
spheres, Islam was the majority religion, although Buddhism, Hinduism, Animism,
and Christianity were and are also present. South Slavic territory was religiously
divided among Muslims and Catholic and Orthodox Christians (as well
as Jews, Armenians, etc.), and, as Greenberg (1996) has shown, these divisions
had almost no effect on local dialects. Unlike the situation with, e.g., Albanian,
however, where religious difference was explicitly overcome, speakers of South
Slavic failed to disconnect the ideas of ethno-linguistic and religious identity –
not only among Croats, Bosniacs, Serbs, etc., but also among Macedonians and
Bulgarians, whose Muslim speakers do not identify (and on the popular level are
not identified by their Christian neighbors) on a linguistic basis (although Goran,
Torbeš, and Pomak identities do combine language and religion). 24
23 In both sets of standards, i.e. Bahasa and those arising from the former Serbo-Croatian, the
choice of dialect base had specific, albeit contrasting, historical reasons connected with factors such
as prestige (overt for Malaysia and Indonesia [McGinn 1991], covert for Vuk’s language), relative
numbers of speakers (majorities in Malaysia and Yugoslavia) and geographic extent – a criterion for
Indonesia together with the fact that in 1928 Malay was native for only 5% of the population (as opposed
to 40% for Javanese), which meant that it was a widespread lingua franca without overtones
of ethnic dominance (McGinn 1991, Sneddon 2003). That not everyone in former Yugoslavia took
the efforts of centrifugalist standardizers seriously can be seen in two episodes of the Yugoslav television
show Top Lista Nadrealista (Surrealists’ Top List), still available on YouTube. They provide
particularly biting satire of the linguistic break-up. The first is Prevodioc ‘The Translator’ http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kkStbK5mCs (accessed 20 January 2011) and Otvoreno o jeziku
‘Openly About Language’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6Ia15riHRw&feature=related (accessed
20 January 2011). The second episode discusses six languages: srpski, hrvatski, bosanski,
hercegovački, crnski, i gorski ‘Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Hercegovinian, Monten, and Negrin.’
24 Collins (2011) has interesting examples from Maluku and Kalimantan in Indonesia of how religious
affiliation can have different effects on language loyalty in different linguistic environments
(ecologies). In Maluku, Christians have shifted to Malay while the preservation of indigenous
languages is more likely among Muslims. In Kalimantan Barat, the westernmost province on the
Indonesian part of the island of Borneo, it is the Muslim population that has shifted to Malay and
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