Примењена лингвистика у част Ранку Бугарском - Језик у

Ronelle Alexander: THE PARADOX OF THE INSTANT TRILINGUAL
fully into Serbian and Croatian and only those two alternatives were available,
Montenegrins would naturally have allied themselves with Serbian on the basis
of shared cultural history (indeed even today roughly half of Montenegrins say
that what they speak is Serbian) even as they maintained a separate Montenegrin
ethnic identity. Given the clear bond between linguistic and cultural identity,
however, Bosnia would literally be torn apart: there would be no “natural”
alliance possible for the sizeable Muslim population. This is the reason that the
establishment of a Bosnian language was next to inevitable. Equally inevitable,
given that the codifiers of this Bosnian language took it upon themselves to imbue
this language with differentializing Bosniak (Muslim) markers, is the situation
whereby post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina has three separate official languages.
This has led to tragicomic impasses in the everyday administrative realms of
education, the judiciary, and similar. No smooth solution is yet in sight.
3. From ‘one’ language to ‘more than one’: an instantaneous shift?
In terms of the breakup of Serbo-Croatian, the critical concept in the above formulation
is the term ‘one’. Both the Vienna agreement of 1850 and the Novi Sad
agreement of 1954 spoke of ‘one language’; at the same time each document
made clear reference to differential markers such as alphabet (both documents)
and pronunciation (the latter). Perhaps the most characteristic phrase is another
laconic Croatian pronouncement (this time by the linguist Ljudevit Jonke), describing
the language as jedan ali ne jedinstven (‘one but not uniform’ [or ‘…
unified’ – translations vary]). Already by the 1960s it was accepted that this ‘one’
language had two clearly differentiated variants, corresponding to the educated
speech of Belgrade and Zagreb, respectively. Although the manifestoes of 1967 –
whereby Croats proclaimed a separate Croatian language and Serbs accepted it on
condition that they too could have a separate Serbian language (including within
Croatia) – were both officially denounced, the 1974 constitution subsequently
gave each republic the right to determine its own official ‘expression’. This was
official recognition of the fact that each of the four major cultural centers of
the Serbo-Croatian speaking area had its own identifiable linguistic expression.
Nevertheless, Serbo-Croatian remained the ‘one’ official language of that part of
the federation, to be replaced by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian only when these
three separate successor countries were recognized.
Yet the concept of ‘one language’ is still hotly debated. Some claim that
there never was a single language, and that the putative existence of one was a
political fiction necessary to hold the state of Yugoslavia together. They cite as
proof not only the existence of variation (which everyone recognizes) but also
the claim that if a particular group feels that its mode of expression constitutes a
98