Language Planning and National Identity in Croatia

K. Langston, A. Peti-Stantic

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137390608
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Following the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, Croatian was declared to be a separate language, distinct from Serbian, and linguistic issues became highly politicized. This book examines the changing status and norms of the Croatian language and its relationship to Croatian national identity, focusing on the period after Croatian independence.

Part II

Croatian Language Policy and Planning in the 1990s and Beyond

5

Language Rights and the Treatment of Croatian on the International Level

Introduction: language rights and the status of Croatian

The idealized Romantic concepts of the nation and the role of national languages are closely tied to the idea of national rights (Pupavac 2012: 62). If we return to the quotation from Fichte mentioned in Chapter 2 (from his Addresses to the German Nation, delivered in Berlin in 1807–1808 while it was occupied by Napoleon’s troops), he explicitly connects language and national identity with political rights in the next clause: ‘it is true beyond doubt that, wherever a separate language is found, there a separate nation exists, which has the right to take independent charge of its affairs and to govern itself’ (Fichte 1922: 215; emphasis added). The understanding of language as fundamental to cultural and national identity necessarily implies the right of a language community to use its language freely, and to define the language on its own terms. Croatian linguists have frequently made such claims in their arguments defending the idea of a separate Croatian linguistic identity. For example, the Matica hrvatska issued a ‘Memorandum on the Croatian language’ which demanded that all international political, scholarly, and cultural institutions respect ‘the inalienable right of the Croatian people and the Croatian state to their own language and its proper name, that is: to the independent Croatian language’ (Matica hrvatska 1996: 166; see also Matica hrvatska 1991 [1967]: 7; HAZU 1996: 164, 2005: 42, 46, 2007b). Claims such as these are consistent with a growing international recognition of language rights, which have generally followed the evolution of human rights thinking from the early 20th century to the present (Hogan-Brun and Wolff 2003: 3–7; Pupavac 2012: 26ff.).

One of the foundational international documents in the area of language rights is the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Article 2 of this document states that the rights and freedoms of the Declaration apply to all people regardless of any distinctions, including language. Article 26, which declares that parents have the right to choose ‘the kind of education that shall be given to their children’, and Article 27, which asserts the right of individuals ‘to freely participate in the cultural life of the community’, can also be interpreted as implying certain language rights. Other UN and UNESCO documents contain explicit provisions guarding not just against discrimination, but calling for the protection of linguistic and cultural identities (Pupavac 2012: 29). One of the most expansive assertions of individual and group language rights can be found in the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights, which was approved at the 1996 World Conference of Linguistic Rights and submitted to UNESCO. This document declares the right of individuals to use their own language both in private and public to be an inalienable personal right ‘which may be exercised in any situation’ (Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights 1996, Article 3.1). It recognizes the rights of groups to the teaching of their language and culture, access to cultural services, the ‘equitable presence of their language and culture in the communications media’, and ‘the right to receive attention in their own language from government bodies and in socioeconomic relations’ (Article 3.2). Furthermore, the declaration states that all language communities should ‘have at their disposal whatever means are necessary to ensure the transmission and continuity of their language’ (Article 8.2), and that they have the right to codify and standardize their language without any interference (Article 9).

Within Europe itself, language rights have been promoted by the Council of Europe, notably in the 1992 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML; see Grin 2003 for a detailed discussion). The European Commission formally adopted a policy to promote multilingualism in 2005, part of which is devoted to ensuring all EU citizens’ access to official EU documents and other information in their own languages (‘A new framework strategy for multilingualism’, Commission of the European Communities 2005). The EU also recognizes virtually all of the official languages of its member states as official languages of the EU.¹ However, the ECRML has not been ratified by all EU member states, and Schilling (2008: 1241) concludes that ‘there is no general principle of Community law requiring the respect of language rights’.

Although the protection of language rights promotes political and social justice, the institutionalization of such rights is not without problems. Language rights are often merely asserted as self-evident truths, with no attempt to provide any theoretical grounding for them (Pupavac 2012: 32–3). The treatment of language rights as natural human rights and their codification in international law means that they can be imposed externally, without regard to national sovereignty and democratic principles. They can also infringe on individual rights and autonomy (Pupavac 2012: 44–6). Arguments in favor of language rights on the grounds that languages are the expression of a collective culture and identity, of ‘a distinct way of perceiving and describing reality’ (Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights, Article 7.1), essentially treat communities and languages as natural entities rather than social constructs (Pupavac 2012: 72). In the context of the former Yugoslavia, the assertion of separate national and linguistic identities did in fact lead to the restriction of individual choices. As the Croatian author Dubravka Ugrešić wrote, in opposition to this essentialization of language and national identity: ‘The language I write was called until recently Serbo-Croat (or Serbian and Croatian), and it was the language spoken by Croats, Serbs, Bosnians and Montenegrins. Today people are trying to force me to recognize Croatian as my mother-tongue, and Serbian and Bosnian as – foreign languages!’ (Ugrešić 1998: 271). Citizens of the former Yugoslavia were certainly aware of the differences among their language varieties, and we can assume that most people identified to a greater or lesser extent with their own particular variety. In everyday speech, people often referred to their language simply as ‘Croatian’ or ‘Serbian’, for example, rather than ‘Serbo-Croatian’, ‘Croato-Serbian’, ‘Croatian or Serbian’, and so on. But this does not mean that everyone agreed with the forced division of what they may have previously understood to represent a single language, and especially not with attempts to increase linguistic divisions and raise barriers to communication within what had functioned before as a single linguistic community.

The official recognition of Croatian on the international level

Following the independence of Croatia and the declaration of Croatian as its official language, Croatian intellectuals and institutions have registered concerns about both the actual and potential failure of international entities to recognize the Croatian language. In 2004, the Office for International Cooperation of the Ministry of Science, Education, and Sports requested an official opinion from HAZU on the status of the Croatian language, ‘which can serve as the basis for a broad diplomatic initiative’ (Grčević 2008: 191, quoting an interview with Mislav Ježić that appeared in the newspaper Vjesnik). This statement was published in the journal Jezik in 2005, and is concerned primarily with the status of the Croatian language in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the EU. The authors cite a number of specific UN, Council of Europe, OSCE, and EU documents that guarantee the protection of linguistic rights as a justification for the equal treatment of Croatian. In several places in this text, HAZU makes specific policy recommendations concerning the status of Croatian on the international level. The authors state that the Croatian government, as well as Croatian diplomats and scholars, should represent and defend the equality of Croatian with other European languages (HAZU 2005: 42). They consider any attempt to deny Croats in Croatia, in the EU, or in Bosnia and Herzegovina the right to freely use their separate literary and/or standard language to be a violation of basic human rights, and insist that this should be the official position of representatives of the Republic of Croatia and representatives of the Croatian inhabitants of Bosnia and Herzegovina (HAZU 2005: 46).

HAZU issued another declaration two years later (‘The position of Croatian in European integration (Položaj hrvatskoga u europskim integracijama)’, HAZU 2007b).² This text was motivated by reports that a British representative to the European Parliament had suggested that the EU should use a single official language for all the countries of the ‘Western Balkans’ for economic reasons.³ The authors of HAZU (2007b) also complain that the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) persistently transmits reports intended for Croatia in Serbian, or less commonly in Bosnian, and that ‘the Croatian language and literature cannot be studied without a forced marriage with Serbian and Bosnian’ at any university in western Europe. They state that it is unclear to the Croatian public whether or not their government has protested against these threats. The tone of this text is highly emotional and includes some obvious exaggerations. For example, the authors state that Europe is preparing a single ‘Bosno-Montenegro-Croato-Serbian’ language for the ‘small fry’ (sitnež) of the Western Balkans, the unity of which would be dictated from some center that already has experience in this [the implication being that Belgrade will once again be in control of the language]. They go on to say that this would mean that the peoples of the Western Balkans would be third-class citizens in Europe (‘narodi s europske treće galerije’) who would have the right to call their language by its own name and cultivate its individual features ‘only in the ghetto of their contemporary states (if this is not also forbidden to them)’. The authors call on the Croatian government to raise the question of the Croatian language as part of official negotiations for accession to the EU, and as in HAZU (2005) they justify their position by referring to the use of one’s own language and of one’s own name for this language as fundamental human rights.

Despite such concerns, both in policy and in practice, Croatian and the mutually comprehensible štokavian-based standard languages used by its neighbors have generally (but not always) been recognized as distinct languages by international organizations in the period following the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. A case in point is the international community’s treatment of these language varieties in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Dayton Peace Agreement ending the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina did not define any official language(s) for the state or establish any other language policies, but the Agreement concludes with a statement that it was executed in the Bosnian, Croatian, English, and Serbian languages, with all of the versions being equally authentic (Askew 2011: 134). Since the Dayton Agreement recognized the existence of three different languages in Bosnia and Herzegovina, international organizations working in the country initially ‘adopted the practice of producing documentation in three separate language versions even though all three versions could be understood by members of all three sides. The impetus for this policy came from the local authorities themselves who demanded the appropriate language version for their particular ethnic group’ (Askew 2011: 136). This practice provided early support for the claims to separate Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian linguistic identities and further solidified ethnic divisions within the region.

The situation changed to some extent after 2001, when the international community began to demand increased cooperation among the different ethnic groups, and the translation policies were relaxed both in the international military forces and in the Bosnia and Herzegovina Ministry of Defense. Citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina working for their own military forces or government would produce documents in their native variety, which would routinely be accepted and approved in that single version, and linguists working for the international forces began producing ‘universal’ or ‘neutral’ translations of texts that avoided ethnically marked linguistic features as much as possible, so that they would be acceptable to all three groups (Askew 2011: 213–15). This change in practices could be interpreted as a partial return to ‘Serbo-Croatian’, as HAZU has warned (HAZU 2007b). However, it is best viewed as a practical recognition of the mutual intelligibility of these language varieties. Similar practices have become common in relations between Croatia and Serbia. For example, statements from Serbian politicians quoted in the Croatian press are typically adapted from ekavian into ijekavian, but officials from both sides communicate without interpreters, rather than symbolically insisting on translation when none is necessary.

Apart from the work of the international community in Bosnia and Herzegovina, there have been other clear affirmations of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian as distinct languages on the international level. For example, the BBC’s Yugoslav Service, which was established in 1939, was split into separate Croatian and Serbian services in the 1990s. Broadcasts in both languages were eventually discontinued due to budget cuts (Croatian in 2005, and Serbian in 2011).⁴ The Voice of America also replaced its Serbo-Croatian language service with separate language services during the Yugoslav conflict in the 1990s. It discontinued its Croatian broadcasts in 2011, after 19 years of operation (Voice of America 2011), but as of 2013 still had separate Serbian and Bosnian services. The Serbian service is intended for both Serbia and Montenegro, according to the VOA website (http://www.glasamerike.net/info/about-us/1829.html), while the Bosnian service broadcasts ‘in the languages of the peoples of BiH [Bosnia and Herzegovina]’ (http://ba.voanews.com/info/about_us/1543.html). Countries with a diplomatic presence in Croatia naturally recognize Croatian as the official language of the country, as can be easily seen in references to the Croatian language on the official embassy websites (the same applies to the other successor states to the former Yugoslavia). Most significantly for Croatia, Croatian became an official language of the EU upon Croatia’s accession on 1 July 2013, which guarantees its official recognition as a distinct language within this part of the international community.

However, as noted above, the ICTY treats Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian as a single language for translating and interpreting purposes (‘Translation and Interpretation’, ICTY [n.d.]), and in at least one of its decisions has stated that there is no linguistic justification for considering them to be separate languages (in reference to a request by the defendant Vojislav Šešelj that he receive documents in Serbian; see Grčević 2008: 190–1). On the basis of mutual intelligibility, this policy can be interpreted as conforming to the UN’s 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which affirms the right to interpretation if a defendant ‘cannot under...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables, and Maps
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Part 01: The Croatian Language Question in Context
• Part 02: Croatian Language Policy and Planning in the 1990s and Beyond
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index