Secession: The Failed National Language Policy of Yugoslavia

Soon after the collapse of the Yugoslav nation in the 1990s, Slovenia and Croatia seceded. Slovenia was the richest, and has a cultural difference in that it was the only portion of Yugoslavia never to have been conquered by the Ottomans. It also speaks a language not mutually intelligible with any of the other Yugoslav sections. Croatia's secession can't as easily be explained. Croatian and Serbian are mutually intelligible, this deviation from the pattern expected by the theory will be addressed below. Six months later Macedonia seceded. Macedonian happens to be mutually intelligble with Bulgarian, but not any other language of Yugoslavia. For the rest Yugoslavia, except Kosovo, its languages are mutually intelligible, but all sections went their own way. Kosovo , the last to secede, is populated by people with speaking a language in a distinct branch of the Indo-European family, Albanian. They were also the poorest.

It can be said that the country broke down along the lines between Tito's administrative divisions, which generally matched the linguistic, but even when it didn't (splits between Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia and Montenegro). Language has not been the only factor in the breakup of Yugoslavia, but it has been a central factor to a united Yugoslav identity for centuries, and also appears to have been used explicitly by the Bosnians, and perhaps soon the Montenegrins, to define their own new nations.

The Creation of a Yugoslav Language

A number of times in the previous two centuries the government of the area of Yugoslavia attempted to forge a national character by adopting a policy to create a single language. The slight differences in the Shtokavian languages were reduced into a language most often called Serbo-Croate or Croato-Serbian.

The history of the region between the end of Ottoman rule and the end of beginning of World War I shows increasing power of Serbia, declared an independent Principality by the European Powers1 after the end of Ottoman rule. Between that time and the start of World War I, Serbia had repeated conflicts with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Empire was weak compared to the other four great powers2 and had a large internal Serbian population which was sympathetic to its neighbors, in addition, the Kingdom of Serbia was angry that Austro-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, even though they had a treaty recognized by the other great powers which allowed this.

Serbia had two major successes in 1912 and 1913 in the first two Balkan Wars, and their own internal difficulties with the bloody murder, by the military, of the King and Queen. This was done by a group known as the "Black Hand" in 1903 in order to place one of their own on the throne.

After the first World War, which was ostensibly started with a royal assassination, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia3 was born. In 1929, Serbo-Croat was declared the national language, part of an attempt to erase linguistic differences. After World War II, the locals having expelled the Nazis with local effort and leadership, the country was laligned with the Soviet Union for a short time. In 1954 Yugoslavian linguists again declared that Yugoslavians spoke one language.

The Breakup

The end of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavias has been unique in the history of the world. They were not conquered, they did not fall to an internal coup, instead, it was generally declared that their organizing economic principle, communism, had failed.

It appears to a casual observer that the dissolution of the 15 former Soviet Republics and 7 former regions of Yugoslavia might have simply been a way to get as far as possible from any connection to the system which is declared to have failed.

That Yugoslavia broke down along the old administrative lines has proved problematic. One of the roots of this problem is the decision by Tito to draw the lines to dampen Serb nationalism. A small Serb population was carved off into other regions. This is part of the problem since Kosovo seceded.

Nation Building: The Creation of the Bosniak Language

For an interesting study which is based on the idea that the Bosnian language was created consciously as a language for the express interest of legitimizing Bosnia and Herzegovina as a nation state in the eyes of the world, see The Boshnjak Identity and Bosnian Language . The final sentence of that article:

If one will apply German Romanticist criteria upon ethnonational identity of/among the Yugoslavs surely at least all Shtokavians (all Serbs, all Montenegrins, all Boshnjaks and majority of Croats) would be considered as a single ethnolinguistic nation with the right to live in their one national state organisation which we can name as Shtokavia .

It should also be pointed out that Serbian and Croatian are not mutually intelligible when written down, since Serbian is written with Cyrllic letters, while Croatian is written with the Latin alphabet. Radio, therefore, is a unifying force (especially if there are no accents), while television is somewhat a force for splitting (the chiron will instantly place the broadcast in one or the other language) while the print media will be entirely differentiating.

Footnotes1. At the conference of Berlin, 1887back

2. France, Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom were the other fourback

3. Originally called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenesback