Pre-defence seminar with Martin Schou Madsen

Contact-induced linguistic changes in Croatian and Serbian. A uniting or dividing feature?

External examiner: Associate Professor, Thomas Olander, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, KUA

Abstract

Contact-induced linguistic changes in Croatian and Serbian. A uniting or dividing feature?

Due to the on-going globalisation of the world, the world’s languages are in a constant and much more intense contact with the English language. English is used ever more in practically all walks of life, from children’s TV programmes over Internet and social media, TV-shows, films to teaching materials at institutions of higher education and in scholarly circles at large.

It comes as no surprise that this constant contact with English – the language of globalisation - leaves its mark on all the contacted languages.

This thesis shows not only how the Croatian and Serbian languages are changing and enriched through this contact but also shows how the normative agents react to the contact-induced changes that Serbian and Croatian speakers apply their language usage. And finally, the thesis shows to what degree these normative reactions are met with approval by the language users.

One crucial concept, which I apply in my analyses of these issues, is the concept of norm.

What is the norm of a language and, most importantly, who forms the norm and what makes them chose what is to become accepted as norm and what is not.

In other words, the role of the actors, that is, the language users as well as the normative bodies of a linguistic community, is key to understanding why certain linguistic changes are broadly accepted and others are not.

What makes it particularly interesting to research this general problem by investigating Croatian and Serbian is the unique similarity of these languages and the complex and problematic relationship between their users; Croats and Serbs.

In spite of the current political definition of Croatian and Serbian as two distinct languages, they were until recently, approx. 25 years ago, considered as one language – Serbo-Croatian – and in the first half of the 20^th century Croats and Serbs were even considered to be and declared by their government to belong to the same nationality. In order to navigate this, linguistically speaking, rather unusual situation, the thesis offers an introduction to the history of the linguistic relationship between Serbs and Croats based on research into and analysis of the different and differing descriptions of this history provided by Croat and Serb linguists[1] as well as linguists and other scholars with no apparent national ties to the region.    

It is commonly accepted that standard Croatian is more resistant to loanwords than standard Serbian. This resistance, is, indeed, often mentioned in descriptions of the dissimilarities between Serbian and Croatian and therefore Croatian is considered more puristic than Serbian. Without rejecting the fact that loanwords are less readily accepted into Croatian, I claim that within other contact-induced linguistic changes the differences between the two languages lie not in the readiness to accept the changes but rather in the ways in which these changes are adopted to the standard as well as in the attitudes of the normative bodies of the two nationalities. Setting aside the very visible signs of foreign influence in the lexis I would also claim that linguistic changes in Serbian and Croatian, induced by contact with dominant languages, diminish the dissimilarities between Croatian and Serbian, that is, the effects of globalisation on language are more uniting, than they are dividing, despite different actors’ efforts to diversify Croatian and Serbian by adapting to linguistic globalisation in different ways.

I support my claim by analysing findings in two electronic text corpora, one Croatian and one Serbian, which I consider representative of the (written) language usage norm among Croats and Serbs and by comparing these findings to the normative standards of the two standard languages.

The specific types of language change that I have investigated comprise linguistic matter (lexemes, semiwords and morphemes), word formational patterns (in derivation and composition) and grammatical patterns (definiteness).

The attitudes toward contact-induced linguistic changes in the normative bodies and among other experts from Croatia and Serbia are presented and investigated on the basis of normative works such as published grammars, orthographic dictionaries, language manuals and not at least on the basis of the large amount of scholarly debate on issues of language between Croat and Serb linguists and internally among Croats and Serbs respectively through the last century.

Throughout the thesis I draw on general frameworks and theories of language change[2], language planning and policy, including questions of norm and standardisation[3], on descriptions of the linguistic categories under investigation[4] as well as existing research within the field of contact linguistics pertaining to the influence of dominant languages on other languages in general and specifically; on Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Serbo-Croatian[5].