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Australian Humanities Review, 2009

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Croatia's Independence and the Language Politics of the 1990s

In A. Liddicoat and K. Muller (eds) Perspectives on Europe: Language Issues and Language planning in Europe. Melbourne: Language Australia, pp. 109-24.

The paper examines the language planning process in Croatia in the 1990s, which involved maintaining the distinctiveness of the Croatian language, both as a marker of its separation from the official 'Serbo-Croatian' of the former Yugoslavia, and as a way of enhancing the autonomy of Croatian from the other South Slav languages. The paper traces the movement from language as a marker of unity among the South Slavs, to language as a marker of separation between the peoples of the former Yugoslavia. Nineteenth century language planning was nationalistic in its scope, in that it sought to use language to develop a sense of common identity between linguistically similar, but culturally separate groups, by attempting to bring the Croatian and the Serbian languages closer together. In the post-Yugoslav period, however, this linguistic unity has been challenged, and the desire to mark a distinctive, independent local identity in Croatia has influenced the nature of Croatian language planning. The paper argues that the practical concerns of communication were subordinated to the symbolic concerns of identity and separation, and that this had a negative effect on the vitality of the language and its communicative functions within Croatian society itself.