Robert D Greenberg. Harvard Ukrainian Studies. Volume 35, Annual 2017.
The intertwining of language and national identity in the former Yugoslavia demonstrates how a federal state with weak internal cohesion can break apart along national, linguistic, and religious lines. While the Titoist ideology of “brotherhood and unity” held the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia together quite successfully until the early 1980s, competing nationalisms that emerged upon Tito’s death worked to create internal divisions and mistrust that led to the breakdown of ethnic relations and to the eventual outbreak of armed conflict in 1991. Nearly a quarter of a century later in another Slavic-speaking state, Ukraine, language and identity issues have been raised concerning the status of the Russian language and of Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine and in Crimea. As in the former Yugoslavia, in Ukraine the language issue has been used by politicians to support demands for collective rights—the rights of the majority Russian population in Crimea to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation, and demands of the separatists in Eastern Ukraine who have sought to carve out independent entities in the Donbas region. While some of the parallels between the former Yugoslavia and Ukraine are striking, my purpose here is to focus on how the language issue in ex-Yugoslavia was used to inflame ethnic tensions, reinforce divisions, and mobilize populations to seek political rights through armed conflict. I posit that the language issue in Ukraine has been used in a similar way between 2010 and 2014 to heighten nationalist sentiments and sharpen ethnic and linguistic divisions.
The final twenty-five years of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1967-91) marked a period of the erosion of the role of a joint Serbo-Croatian/Croato-Serbian language and the gradual emergence of ethnically and nationalistically inspired separate languages: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian. Linguists and other scholars have been divided regarding how to define the contemporary linguistic situation in the former Yugoslavia: Do these new languages still all belong to the same dialect base? Are they linguistic variants of the same language? Are they politically or ethnically inspired names for the same language? Is there an agenda to consciously work towards further differentiations among the successor languages, leading to decreases in mutual intelligibility over time? Many of these questions cannot easily be answered. Some scholars, such as Snjezana Kordic and Ranko Bugarski, base their opinions on the linguistic facts, and given the similarities in phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon deem all four successor languages to be variants of a single language. Other scholars, for example Ronelle Alexander, suggest that sociolinguistically the languages have separated and have embarked on their own paths of codification and independent evolution. While in the case of ex-Yugoslavia the question of what makes a language a language frequently arises, in Ukraine the more prevalent question is the relationship between two competing languages, Russian and Ukrainian, on the territory of Ukraine. In the Ukrainian context, the question needs to be expanded and becomes “what makes a language an official language”—is it the language most widely spoken in the country (Russian), or the language that is a clearer marker of Ukrainian national identity (Ukrainian)? To understand both these questions, I first provide some analysis of the link between language and identity, and analyze the historical evolution of the language/identity debate for the language that used to be known as Serbo-Croatian—the joint language of two South Slavic states (royalist Yugoslavia from 1918 to 1941) and socialist Yugoslavia (from 1945 to 1991).
John E. Joseph asserts that group identities are often manifested through shared linguistic features. These linguistic features are not necessarily fixed in a given individual; rather, “we read an identity onto the people whose words we hear and read.” When languages are genetically related and share similar lexical stock and phonological and morphological features, the differences in speech may be formalized through the codification of language-specific writing systems that enshrine the distinctive linguistic identity of one language as opposed to its similar neighboring language. In the history of the codification of Slavic languages, new graphemes were first introduced by Vuk Karadzic in the nineteenth century, with his introduction of several Serbian-specific symbols to denote phonemes typical of the Serbian vernacular. Later that century, the codifers of a Ukrainian literary language, including Panteleimon Kulish, Mykhailo Drahomanov, and Ievhen Zhelekhivs’kyi, similarly introduced three new graphemes that have become unique to Ukrainian Cyrillic (e, i, i) that distinguish the Ukrainian alphabet from the Russian. The most recent orthographic innovations in the Slavic world are two letters that were introduced into the Montenegrin alphabet in 2009 (s and z). While the introduction of new graphemes may constitute an overt effort to differentiate among closely related languages, other means for differentiation, which I have called ethnolinguistic markers, may also be used by language codifers to draw attention to linguistic divergences that may range from the subtle to the obvious. For the languages of ex-Yugoslavia these markers include the emphasis on the use of the velar-fricative phoneme h [x] for the speakers of the Bosnian language as opposed to the speakers of Serbian or Croatian, or in the Ukrainian context, the replacement of the phoneme g with h in native Slavic words, which distinguishes standard Ukrainian from standard Russian.
Such ethnolinguistic markers may be used negatively in connection with conflict among speakers of similar languages or dialects. This negative manifestation has a long history, as demonstrated by the story of a dialect difference between two ancient Israelite tribes and their pronunciation of the Hebrew word “shibboleth” (meaning ‘ear of corn’). The dialect of one Israelite tribe lacked the phoneme s. The members of the tribe of Gilead pronounced the consonant as the palatal s, while the members of the tribe of Ephraim pronounced this consonant as the spirant s. The Ephraimites were easily identified through this single linguistic marker, and according to the Book of Judges, their inability to pronounce the palatal s proved fatal for thousands of members of the tribe: ‘”Then say Shibboleth,’ and he said, ‘Sibboleth,’ for he could not pronounce it right. Then they seized him and slaughtered him at the fords of the Jordan. At that time 42,000 of the Ephraimites fell.”
The biblical shibboleth story has had several new incarnations in crimes motivated by ethnic hatred or religious intolerance. In the former Yugoslavia, Hammel noted how ethnolinguistic markers served as shibboleths in the context of the conflicts between Croatian Ustasa forces and Serbian Cetnik supporters during World War II, when prisoners were ask to recite the Lord’s Prayer to determine their Serb or Croat ethnicity as revealed by the use of Croatian kruh versus Serbian hleb for ‘bread! These terrifying litmus tests could cost a prisoner his or her life. More recently, in late 1999 after the end of the NATO bombing campaign that led to a NATO deployment in Kosovo, Valentin Krumov, a Bulgarian citizen working for the United Nations, was murdered in the streets of Pristina/Prishtina when he innocently answered a question posed to him in Serbian. The Albanians who attacked him mistook him for a Serb.
While the emulations of the shibboleth story demonstrate the extreme abuse of ethnolinguistic markers in conflict situations, the striking and polarizing alignment of language with ethnicity and national identity has been a significant element in the deterioriation of ethnic/national relations in ex-Yugoslavia. To better understand how such a deterioration occurred, it is instructive to analyze the sociolinguistic situation in the light of Howard Giles’ work on ethnic markers in speech and Judith Irvine and Susan Gal’s work on language ideologies.
Giles developed the notion of “hard” and “soft” boundaries among ethnic or social groups, contending that these boundaries exist on various levels—linguistic, religious, cultural, racial, or other; these boundaries typically exist to differentiate ingroups and outgroups. When the linguistic boundaries are soft, the interlingual markers—or what I referred to above as ethnolinguistic markers—are often exaggerated. In other words, the more similar the cultural, religious, or linguistic heritage of peoples/nationalities who live side by side in communities, cities, or within the boundaries of a nation-state, the greater the potential that the ethnolinguistic markers will be strengthened or exaggerated. I encountered this phenomenon while conducting fieldwork with a Bulgarian colleague in the small village of Dermanci in Bulgaria in 1995. This village is located on a dialect boundary—villages to the east render the Common Slavic jat’ by ja/e, while villages to the west render it by e. In Dermanci, however, an intermediate reflex of jat’ was observed—a wide e. I noted that this “wide e” was often exaggerated by the villagers in their speech; they were aware that it was something that distinguished them from the speakers in neighboring Bulgarian villages, and spoke this phoneme with pride as a mark of the distinct Dermanci linguistic brand.
According to Giles, ethnic speech markers are exaggerated in situations where ethnolinguistic vitality is deemed to be strong. My research suggests that in the former Yugoslavia and the wider Balkan region, such vitality has been strong, as demonstrated by Kenneth Naylor’s observation that “we must assume that language serves as the ‘flag’ (barjak) by which a group declares its independence, especially in Yugoslavia.” Naylor’s words were prophetic, since with the breakup of the unitary Yugoslav state between 1991 and 2008, seven new nations emerged, and in four of these new nations, the successor languages to Serbo-Croatian gained official status. These successor languages gained official status through declarations either in new constitutions—Croatian in 1990, Serbian in 1992, and Montenegrin in 2007—or through the internationally brokered Dayton Accords, which enshrined the status of the Bosnian language in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995. The notion of “language as a flag” became an ideology of linguistic separatism that arose as a reaction to the long-standing language ideologies of the unified South Slavic states—royalist Yugoslavia of the interwar period and socialist Yugoslavia—where successive governments attempted to implement a joint Serbo-Croatian language.
Irvine and Gal have termed this ideology to be the ideology of “erasure.” Under such an ideology, language policy has the goal of simplifying the sociolinguistic picture, rendering phenomena or persons “invisible.” Exposed to this ideological pressure, the main national groups of Yugoslavia sought to assert a separatist linguistic ideology emphasizing their own peculiar ethnolinguistic features. In Irvine and Gal’s terminology, this kind of language ideology is referred to as iconization, whereby a “linguistic feature portrays a group’s ‘inherent’ nature or essence.” These two ideological constructs—erasure and iconization—provide a theoretical framework through which to better understand what has made a language a language among the peoples of the former Yugoslavia.
The first manifestation of the ideology of erasure can be seen in the 1850 Literary Agreement signed by Serb and Croat intellectuals that affirmed the need for a single literature and literary language for the Serbs and Croats. At that time, both groups were living under multinational empires. Croats and some Serbs were subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while the majority of Serbs were under Ottoman Turkish rule. The Literary Agreement, signed in Vienna, was a by-product of the national revival movements that began in the late-eighteenth-century Austro-Hungarian Empire. These movements included a strong pan-Slavic group that was influenced by the romanticism of the times and sought to bolster pan-Slavic solidarity. The signatories of the Literary Agreement asserted that “We, the undersigned, aware that one people needs to have one literature, and in that connection with dismay witnessing how our literature is splintered not only by alphabets but still by orthographic rules as well….” While this Literary Agreement was by no means binding, nor was it adopted by the Austro-Hungarian authorities to inform their language policy in the South Slavic territories under their control, the joint language persevered as a concept and reinforced the Yugoslav idea that began emerging among Croats and Serbs in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, founded at the end of World War I, marked the political manifestation of the Yugoslav idea with the establishment of the royalist Yugoslav state. This state promoted the ideology of erasure among the peoples, particularly during the regime of King Alexander, who suspended constitutional arrangements and assumed absolute power in 1929. Simultaneously, he changed the name of the country to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which was meant to promote a Yugoslav identity and erase the separate Serb, Croat, and Slovene identities. This policy included a push towards increased uniformity in the orthography and codification of the joint Serbo-Croatian language, which was implemented with the publication of Aleksandar Belic’s orthographic manual in 1930. The Croats vehemently opposed these measures, and during the time of the fascist Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi puppet state set up in 1941, the Croatian Ustasa regime reversed all the language decisions of the royalist state, establishing a puristically inspired writing system for a Croatian language independent of the legacy of the joint language traditions between Serbs and Croats. This short period during the war marked an extreme version of the ideology of iconization, where puristic Croatian was lauded and the language was cleansed of Serbianisms and the influences that had shaped the literary language during the previous decades.
With the victory of Tito’s partisans and the establishment of the socialist Yugoslav state, the ideology of erasure was reintroduced under the over-arching official doctrine of “brotherhood and unity.” Since Yugoslavia was conceived of as a nation-state of five primarily Slavic nations (Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs, and Slovenes), later six constituent nations (Muslims were fully elevated to this status by 1971), the Serbo-Croatian/Croato-Serbian language gained prominence as the language of broader communication. To avoid the controversy of the previous joint state, Tito’s Yugoslavia enacted a new linguistic arrangement whereby the joint language for Serbs and Croats was declared to be a single language with two equal and official variants—the eastern variant centered around Belgrade and the western variant centered around Zagreb. This policy maintained the spirit of erasure while admitting certain “iconic” differentiating features in the two fully equal and legitimate variants of the single language. The key iconic linguistic markers included: (1) the so-called “Ekavian” versus “Ijekavian” pronunciations; for example, (western) grijeh versus (eastern) greh ‘sin’; (2) some grammatical differences, such as the use of infinitive in the western versus replacement of the infinitive by da + present tense in the eastern; and (3) some orthographic and lexical differences, including (western) bit cu versus (eastern) bicu ‘I will be’; (western) vlak versus (eastern) voz ‘train!
This arrangement of two equal variants began eroding in the 1970s when further official varieties of the unified language were recognized in the Socialist Republics of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Montenegro. These republican norms were referred to as “standard linguistic idioms” that were given legitimacy through the new constitutions in these republics that sprang out of the constitutional reforms on the federal level in 1974. As I have argued elsewhere, these standard linguistic idioms became embryonic separate languages, and this increased iconization and linkage of language with ethnicity became the dominant discourse in the post-Yugoslav period.
In the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, language policy has largely relied on the ideology of iconization through the privileging of distinctive ethnolinguistic markers, resulting in the rise of four separate national languages. Through these developments, the idea of “language as a flag” has translated into language as a key factor in establishing new nation-states or entities in which former nations/ethnic groups of Yugoslavia can identify with with their own national language. In the following section, I will briefly describe these developments in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia.
Declaring its independence from Yugoslavia in June 1991, Croatia was well positioned to embark on its new path as an independent country. As Alex Bellamy has pointed out, Croats could be united through the promulgation over many decades of a notion of an uninterrupted historical narrative for the Croatian people reaching back to medieval times. This narrative included the period of a Croatian kingdom up to 1102 and the free choice of Croatian nobles to to be subjugated to neighboring powers over the centuries while still retaining a sense of separate identity and an imagined historical statehood. In addition, this Croatian national identity has been reinforced through a tradition of vernacular Croatian literature dating back to the sixteenth century. Iconic features of the Croatian speech territory included a preference for pure Slavic vocabulary rather than borrowed internationalisms, and the strong influence of the Southern Dalmatian/Dubrovnik dialect on the evolution of the Croatian standard language. Since 1991, the introduction of more Croatian elements into the language and the reduction in perceived Serbianism has been a priority for language codifiers and policymakers. The supremacy of the Croatian language in Croatia reinforces the notion of Croatia as a strong nation-state with an overwhelming proportion of the population declaring itself to be of Croat nationality.
By contrast, Bosnia-Herzegovina, recognized as an independent state by many Western governments in 1992, has remained a contested nation-state formed by its three primary nations—Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs. Since the signing of the Dayton Accords, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s two entities, Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, have failed to work together effectively to move the country closer to Euro-Atlantic integration. The complex interethnic relations in Bosnia-Herzegovina are reflected in the challenges of maintaining three official languages—Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian—and often three separate educational systems for members of each of the ethnic groups. The Bosnian language, predominantly embraced by the Bosniaks (formerly known as Muslim Slavs in socialist Yugoslavia), has not been promoted under an ideology of erasure that would have unifed all citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina under a single national language. Rather, the language has primarily served to unify those identifying as Bosniaks; the language has been infused with iconic features that include the use of the phoneme h and words of Turkish and Arabic origin. Moreover, the Bosnian language has been embraced by citizens living beyond the borders of Bosnia-Herzegovina, as the Muslim Slavs of the Sandzak region of Serbia and Montenegro have increasingly embraced a Bosnian language and a Bosniak identity. These Sandzak Bosniaks have sought to assert the status of the Bosnian language in both countries.
In Montenegro, the language and identity connection remains controversial nearly a decade after Montenegro became an independent country following its separation from the Republic of Serbia and Montenegro (previously the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, 1992-2003). While advocates of a distinct Montenegrin language worked in earnest on developing the norms for a new Montenegrin standard language following the breakup of socialist Yugoslavia in 1991, credence to these developments was given only after Montenegrin independence and the official elevation of the Montenegrin language to official status through the 2007 Montenegrin Constitution. Despite this development, as of 2011 a plurality of Montenegro’s citizens still did not consider their native language to be Montenegrin. The results of the 2011 Montenegrin census revealed that the Serbian language was identified as the mother tongue by 44 percent of the population, whereas the Montenegrin language was declared as the mother tongue by only 36 percent of the population. The linguistic, religious, and cultural boundaries between Montenegrins and Serbs are, in Giles’ terminology, soft, and therefore the ethnolinguistic markers to distinguish Montenegrin from Serbian have become exaggerated. Thus, of all the new successor languages to the formerly joint Serbo-Croatian language, only the Montenegrin language has modified its alphabet to more explicitly distinguish itself from the Serbian language. The codifers of Montenegrin have added the two graphemes mentioned above that are meant to represent iconic Montenegrin sounds/phonemes. To add to the overall linguistic confusion, the 2007 Montenegrin Constitution has elevated Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian to official status alongside Montenegrin, and in 2011 the Ministry of Education of Montenegro agreed that the “mother tongue” subject in schools would be called “Montenegrin-Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian Language and Literature.” This complex language situation in Montenegro demonstrates that the Montenegrin language project remains contested; it has gained no official acceptance in neighboring Serbia, and even many of the country’s citizens appeared to be skeptical about adopting the term “Montenegrin” for their language.
In Serbia, the notion of the Serbs as the primary nation-forming group of an independent Republic of Serbia became enshrined in the Serbian Constitution of 2006 after the Serbia/Montenegro split. However, given the large percentage of Serbs residing across the international boundaries in Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Croatia, the ideology of Serbia’s language policymakers has continued to be one of erasure that can serve to unite Serbs through the Cyrillic script and the admittance of two official dialects—the Ekavian dialect of most of Serbia and the Ijekavian dialect of western Serbia, and primarily of the Serbs in the other former Yugoslav lands with the exception of Kosovo and Macedonia. While attempts have been made to erase linguistic boundaries among Serbs, the efforts of the Serb minority in Eastern Croatia, especially in Vukovar, to allow for bilingual signage in Croatian (Latin) and Serbian (Cyrillic) scripts, reflects the attempts to assert the iconic feature of Vuk Karadzic’s Serbian Cyrillic script as one that characterizes Serb identity in Croatia. This matter sparked significant tension in Vukovar and other areas with Serb minorities in Croatia in 2013, as the government in Croatia adopted legislation to guarantee the use of bilingual signs in regions of Croatia where Serbs constituted a minimum of 33 percent of the population. This decision sparked angry opposition from various groups in Croatia, especially the veterans of the Serb-Croat war of the 1990s. These opponents were quick to tear down any bilingual signs that were posted in Vukovar, and the town council voted to oppose the erection of such signs, given Vukovar’s special status as the scene of some of the worst fighting and casualties during the war. The status of the Serbian language outside of Serbia continues to be a source of tension that has been manipulated by political and social groups to further or suppress the collective rights of minority language speakers.
As this analysis has shown, language issues are frequently used to promote the collective rights of minority groups and to mobilize groups to Lake action. Thus, in response to perceived or real threats to the language status quo in Ukraine, pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine and Crimea have raised the specter of Ukrainization and have sought the protection of the Russian Federation or have pursued secessionist policies leading to armed conflict. Similarly, in ex-Yugoslavia some Bosniaks, Croats, and Montenegrins felt threatened by what they considered to be Serbian hegemony, and sought to assert the independence of their own languages as a precursor to or manifestation of political secession from Yugoslavia between 1991 and 2006. In both Ukraine and the former Yugoslavia, armed conflict has been possible through the support of an interested neighboring lobby kin-state: Serbia under Milosevic and Russia under Putin. In both cases, the lobby kin-state has provided separatist forces or militias across the border with military, financial, and moral support. Politicians in the lobby kin-states cite issues of national pride, preserving the language and culture, and promoting solidarity with ethnic kin as key motivations for pursuing policies that many other political leaders have viewed as dangerous meddling in the affairs of a neighboring internationally recognized state. Moreover, Russians were the largest ethnic group in the Soviet Union, just as Serbs were the most numerous group in socialist Yugoslavia. With the collapse of both states in 1991, Russians found themselves to be minorities in newly independent former Soviet Republics, and Serbs similarly became minorities separated from Serbia by new international boundaries. To a great extent the conflicts in both Ukraine and ex-Yugoslavia reflect the flipping of status from majority to minority and the concomitant rise of nationalist movements in the new successor states.
The questions of when a language is a language or when a language is an official language are often controversial; as demonstrated here, these interrelated questions can be used to incite suspicion and mistrust. While the language questions in the former Yugoslavia and in Ukraine are different, the fundamental language-related issues remain salient: to what extent is language linked with national identity, and how do changes in the language status quo impact on interethnic relations? Do the Serbs who remain in Vukovar and the surrounding area of eastern Slavonia feel threatened that the bilingual signs have not survived the wrath of the opponents to this policy? Why did the attempt by the Ukrainian Parliament in February 2014 to rescind a 2010 language law on the status of the Russian language evoke such a swift and decisive negative reaction from pro-Russian activists in eastern Ukraine and Crimea? Will the apparent rise in Ukrainian nationalism following the Euromaidan protests of 2013-14 result in efforts to strengthen the position and status of the Ukrainian language at the expense of the Russian language in Ukraine? While it is too early to answer all these questions fully, the lessons from the Yugoslav situation prove to be instructive as a case study to provide context for events in contemporary Ukraine. The notions of ethnolinguistic markers, language as a flag, and the ideologies of erasure and iconization can be applied to explain how language policymakers can manipulate sociolinguistic situations to further political goals. Although I have touched only the surface here on the parallels between the former Yugoslavia and Ukraine, this topic may prove to be a source of much further research that can help us gain a better understanding of the origins and causes of both conflicts.