Language and Ethnonationalism in Contemporary West Central Balkans: A Corpus-based Approach 3030721760, 9783030721763

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Language and Ethnonationalism in Contemporary West Central Balkans A Corpus-based Approach Adnan Ajšić

Language and Ethnonationalism in Contemporary West Central Balkans

Adnan Ajši´c

Language and Ethnonationalism in Contemporary West Central Balkans A Corpus-based Approach

Adnan Ajši´c Department of English American University of Sharjah University City, United Arab Emirates

ISBN 978-3-030-72176-3 ISBN 978-3-030-72177-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72177-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Aiden Mak

Contents

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1

Introduction 1.1 Questione Della Lingua in Modern West Central Balkans 1.2 A Brief Sociolinguistic History of Modern Central South Slavic 1.3 Language, Identity, and Ethnonationalism in Contemporary West Central Balkans References

11 17

Central Theoretical Concepts and the Current Research Context 2.1 Ethnonationalism 2.2 Language Ideology 2.3 Discourse 2.4 The Current Research Context References

23 25 26 32 33 38

3

Data and Methods 3.1 The Corpora 3.2 Methods and Research Design References

47 47 49 57

4

Quantitative Results by Method 4.1 Keyword Analysis 4.2 Collocation Analysis

61 61 66

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3 5

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viii

CONTENTS

4.3 Exploratory Factor Analysis 4.4 Analysis of Variance 4.5 Cluster Analysis References 5

Qualitative Results by Method 5.1 Content and Thematic Analysis 5.2 The Discourse-Historical Approach: Topoi References

6

Language-Related Discourses, Language Ideologies, and Ethnonationalism 6.1 The Discourse of Endangerment 6.2 The Discourse of Contestation 6.3 Monolingualism and Standard Language Ideology 6.4 Language as the Essence of Ethnonational Identity 6.5 The Role of Language in the Serbian Ethnonationalist Project References

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71 85 87 96 99 100 113 116 121 122 125 126 128 131 138

Conclusion 7.1 The Advantages of Multivariate Statistics and the Three-Step Approach 7.2 Linguistic Authority and Ethnonationalism in West Central Balkans References

143

Coda: Big Data vs. Small Minds References

159 161

144 150 157

Appendices

163

Index

175

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 6.1

Central South Slavic Dialects Before the 1990s Yugoslav Wars Research Design Sample concordance lines for Postoji ‘Exists’ in 5+ SERBCORP Diachronic distribution of 5+ Hit Articles (by year, all publications) Concordance Lines for Rasparˇcavanje ‘Partitioning’ in SERBCORP

6 56 69 94 125

ix

List of Tables

Table Table Table Table

3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2

Table 4.3 Table 4.4 Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table

4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12

Table 4.13 Table 4.14 Table 4.15 Table 4.16

Composition of 5+ SERBCORP Composition of 1–4 SERBCORP Top 30 positive keywords in 5+ SERBCORP Key semantic domains in 5+ SERBCORP (by number of items) Top 30 collocates of language in 5+ SERBCORP (by frequency) Sample of the most frequent N-grams in 5+ SERBCORP (by type and frequency) Summary of the factorial structure Top 10 highest scoring articles for Factor 2 Top 10 highest scoring articles for Factor 11 Top 10 highest scoring articles for Factor 4 Top 10 highest scoring articles for Factor 8 Top 10 highest scoring articles for Factor 10 Top 10 highest scoring articles for Factor 6 Descriptive statistics for Factor 6 scores (synchronic variation) Descriptive statistics for Factor 6 scores (diachronic variation) Descriptive statistics for Factor 6 scores (agent variation) Basic descriptive statistics for all twelve factors in a six-cluster solution Results of ANOVA for twelve factors in a six-cluster solution

49 49 62 65 67 70 72 76 77 79 80 82 83 86 86 87 88 90

xi

xii

LIST OF TABLES

Table Table Table Table Table

4.17 4.18 4.19 4.20 A.1

Table B.1

Cluster composition in a six-cluster solution Cluster membership (synchronic variation) Cluster membership (diachronic variation) Cluster membership (agent variation) Positive Key Lemmas in 5+ SERBCORP (by Keyness Score) Lemma Collocates of the Lemma jezik ‘Language’ in 5+ SERBCORP (by Frequency)

91 92 93 93 163 166

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract This chapter offers an overview of the argument and provides the necessary background information to contextualize the analysis. The first section defines the study’s focus (the links between language ideologies and ethnonationalism) and explains its significance to contemporary West Central Balkans. The second section delves into the politics of language in this region based on a brief sociolinguistic history of the region, necessary for an understanding of the outsize role played by language in the modern political history of the Central South Slavic area. The third section delineates the study’s aim and scope and provides a rationale for the choice of data (contemporary newspaper discourse), foregrounding the language question as a crucial component in the process of post-Yugoslav reconstruction and maintenance of Central South Slavic ethnonational identities as well as a pervasive culture of contestation between these groups. The chapter ends with a brief outline of the rest of the book. Keywords West Central Balkans · Central South Slavic · Ethnonational identity · Contestation

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Ajši´c, Language and Ethnonationalism in Contemporary West Central Balkans, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72177-0_1

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´ A. AJŠIC

A nation has nothing holier nor dearer than its natural language, for it is only through language that a nation, as a particular society, continues or vanishes. Ljudevit Gaj (1835)

There is only one thing more preposterous than the claim that people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia speak different languages: it is the claim that they speak the same language. The first claim is absurd because the degree of mutual comprehensibility is easily greater than that between British and American English, for example, approaching 100% (Harvard University). The second claim, on the other hand, is absurd both because it is so manifestly true but also because the language is shared by ethnically and culturally different groups who see language as a cornerstone of their identity and management of their own language as a political right. Thus, on the one hand, to argue that Central South Slavic (formerly known as Serbo-Croatian) really is four different languages (Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian) is to ignore the obvious near-full mutual comprehensibility, which has existed for well over a century, as well as a history of joint codification. On the other hand, to argue that it really is one language and one language only (i.e., Serbian) is to be a bad neighbor and trample on other people’s rights (as well as to ignore some inconvenient facts). And yet, public debates on language in West Central Balkans continue to oscillate between these two poles, creating much animosity, some legal issues, and often absurd circumstances. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the debate typically flares up in the runup to high-profile political events such as the country’s first postwar census (October 2013) or general election campaigns (e.g., in 2014 and 2018). The contestation has centered on the legitimacy of Bosnian (as opposed to Bosniak) as an official language, with authorities in the Serbdominated part of the country refusing to allow language instruction and certification in government-run schools to proceed under this name, while Bosniak residents and the Bosniak public, including representatives of the country’s Islamic Community, continue to insist on this historical label for the language. In Croatia, the debate has centered on the absurdity of periodic attempts to force ‘translation’ from Serbian into

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Croatian (e.g., subtitling Serbian films in Croatian cinemas) and the reintroduction of dual-script public signs including the Cyrillic script and the sometimes-violent protests against it by the Croatian far-right in the easternmost Croatian city of Vukovar, which has a sizeable Serb minority. In Montenegro, the debate has centered on efforts to standardize Montenegrin and dissociate it from Serbian, partly to shore up Montenegro’s newly won independence and political sovereignty. Finally, in Serbia the debate has centered on the recognition of Bosnian as a minority language, which came as a consequence of the country’s membership in the Council of Europe and its accession negotiations with the European Union, and the occasional insistence on ‘translation’ between Bosnian and Serbian in Serbian courts, as well as the legitimacy of Montenegrin. Recent years have also seen a pan-ethnic academic attempt to counter nationalist manipulation of language by issuing the Declaration on the Common Language (Languages and Nationalisms) which asserts broader linguistic unity while being careful to recognize individual groups’ political rights. Why is all this happening?

1.1 Questione Della Lingua in Modern West Central Balkans Language, of course, is a primary defining characteristic of homo sapiens as a species1 and as such it has always been of paramount importance to humans: as a means of communication, as an identity marker, and as a cultural and political tool. As is well known, its importance as an ideological tool in the struggle for hegemonic power in late modernity has been growing further still (Bourdieu, 1991; Fairclough, 2015; Foucault, 1972; Habermas, 1989; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000). Although the societies of West Central Balkans (i.e., the former Yugoslavia), do not always fit in the category of late modernity neatly, the significance of language in both the historical/modern sense (as a primary identity construction site) and the postmodern sense (as a mechanism of social control) is perhaps nowhere as great as “language has played a crucial role in both the formation and the disintegration of Yugoslavia” (Bugarski, 2004a, p. xi). Indeed, as Robert Greenberg (2004/2008) notes in the conclusion to his book Language and identity in the Balkans : Serbo-Croatian and its disintegration, “in the former Yugoslavia the power of language has at times reached absurd proportions” (p. 159). Thus, in West Central Balkans, that part of the former Yugoslavia divided by a common language, the language situation remains a paradoxical source of intense contestation and conflict.

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Although such language conflict is not unique but represents a possible “sociolinguistic universal” (Ford, 2001), the language situation in the former Yugoslavia is fascinating and complex, and can only be understood with reference to the historical and sociopolitical circumstances in the region. Academic treatments of language in late modernity, especially vis-à-vis globalization, almost invariably discuss colonialism as the backdrop to sociolinguistic developments globally (e.g., Wright, 2004, 2012). Ironically, despite the oft-repeated references to the region’s history, discussions of language in the former Yugoslavia, academic and otherwise, routinely fail to appreciate the importance of the region’s own colonial history, which, it is often forgotten, is longer than most and, unlike most, is a product of both Western and Eastern imperialisms (however, see Hajdarpaši´c, 2015). Beyond the direct impact of the dueling colonialist enterprises (political, cultural, linguistic, etc.), and equally important, is the impact of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Western language ideologies, which were received “enthusiastically” in Eastern Europe (Edwards, 1985; for an illustrative example, see Gal, 2001), particularly in the Balkans (cf. Irvine & Gal, 2000, especially pp. 60–71). Here, two strands of thought are important: the rationalization of language in the empiricist tradition of seventeenth-century English Enlightenment associated with John Locke, and particularly, the idealization of folk language in the spirit of eighteenth-century German Romanticism associated with Johann Gottfried (von) Herder (cf. Bauman & Briggs, 2000). It is important to recognize and understand the characteristic instrumentalization of language in ethnonationalist projects that these ideologies have made possible. Anachronistic yet coinciding with “the rise of small nations” (Wright, 2004) at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, the Balkan ethnonationalisms harken back to the Romantic nationalist ideal of a one-to-one equation between nation, language, and territory (Leerssen, 2013) or ‘normative isomorphism’ (tight spatial and symbolic overlapping of language, nation, and state, Kamusella, 2018), and employ it in their projects of “contrastive self-identification” (Fishman, 1972, p. 58), characterized by a cult-like ˇ obsession with (purported) ethnolinguistic authenticity (Colovi´ c, 2004). The outcome is what Greenberg (2004/2008), following Heinz Kloss, has called the “nominal language death” of Serbo-Croatian, the erstwhile common yet polycentric standard (Kordi´c, 2010), as well as a multiplicity of mutually contested language ideologies (cf. Gal, 1998), waving the successor languages as “flags” (Friedman, 1999; Naylor, 1992). It is

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this language ideology, deeply involved in the ethnonationalist projects through its deployment via public discourses in the post-Yugoslav reconstruction and maintenance of ethnic identities, that is the focus of this book. In order to frame the issue and assist readers in understanding the discussion in the rest of the book, the following section offers a brief modern sociolinguistic history of the region, before moving on to offer a rationale and delimitation for this study. This account draws on Greenberg (2004/2008, 2017/2018), both comprehensive and fairly neutral (but not unproblematic) treatments of the topic,2 and to a lesser extent on Bugarski and Hawkesworth (2004), Busch (2010), Carmichael (2000), Dronjic (2011), Ivanova (2012), Katiˇci´c (1997), Langston and Peti-Stanti´c (2014), Okey (2004), and Tollefson (2002), as well as my own emic perspective.

1.2 A Brief Sociolinguistic History of Modern Central South Slavic The Slavic languages of the former Yugoslavia (with the addition of Bulgarian) form the southern branch of the Slavic language family. Slovenian at the northwest and Macedonian at the southeast ends of the area are separate languages of the Abstand type (Kloss, 1967), whereas the larger central part of the area (Central South Slavic), spanning, west-toeast and north-to-south, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Montenegro, features a continuum of mutually comprehensible dialects, with one particular dialect (the Neo-Štokavian) spanning all four countries and all four ethnic groups (i.e., Bosniaks, Croats, Montenegrins, and Serbs). Considering the long and varied colonial history of the region3 and the concomitant differences in culture and religion,4 it is remarkable that a common dialect would develop and survive over the centuries (Okey, 2004). This became especially important in the nineteenth century as the peoples of this region sought independence and, following the trend in the rest of Europe, the formation of their own nation-states. Concurrently with the drive for independence, however, a pan-Slavic linguapolitical movement (the Illyrianists, led by the language reformer Ljudevit Gaj) came into existence in Croatia which sought the unification of South Slavs and their language based on a common dialect. Linguistic unification within the Austro-Hungarian empire being a more realistic

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goal than political unification outside of it at the time,5 a group of prominent Serbian and Croatian linguists and literary figures met in 1850 in Vienna, Austria to produce what would become known as the Vienna Literary Agreement, which is widely considered to be the inception of a common standard language for the Central South Slavic area (but see Katiˇci´c, 1997 for a problematization of this view). The agreement was non-binding, however, and it did not venture far beyond the status planning decision to base the common standard on the “southern dialect” (i.e., the Neo-Štokavian, see Fig. 1.1) rather than on an artificial amalgam of existing dialects (for the original text and an English translation of the agreement, see Greenberg, 2004/2008, pp. 168–171). Crucially, the name for this new common literary standard was left unspecified.6 It is a truism, as Ricento (2006) for example notes, that language is inextricably linked to power. The common standard that had been agreed upon in 1850 in Vienna would therefore have to wait for the political circumstances to change to be fully implemented. However, by the time

Fig. 1.1 Central South Slavic Dialects Before the 1990s Yugoslav Wars

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favorable circumstances materialized at the end of World War I, the politics of language in the region had also changed. Despite an initial defeat in the war with Austria that began in the wake of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Serbia eventually recovered and joined the Triple Entente allies in victory over Germany and Austria-Hungary. Owing to the war effort and allied support, Serbia was then granted its own regional sphere of influence, which resulted in the formation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in 1918, the first joint South Slavic state. Importantly, Serbia was the only South Slavic nation that entered the union as a military power and an independent state,7 while ethnic groups other than Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (i.e., Bosniaks, Macedonians, and Montenegrins) were not granted political recognition at this time. Much like the Vienna Literary Agreement, the new state turned out to be largely a Serbo-Croatian affair, wherein the Croats fought to resist the sometimes real, sometimes perceived Serbian hegemony.8 The political bickering destabilized the country, so in 1929 the reigning Serbian monarch, King Alexander, seized the opportunity to change the constitution and with it, symbolically, the country’s name into Yugoslavia.9 The period between 1850 and 1929, on the other hand, saw more status and corpus planning work (see Greenberg, 2004/2008, p. 54, for an overview of landmark events). But, despite a shared dialect, the region harbored a number of quite disparate linguistic traditions: there were two different scripts in use (Latin and Cyrillic) and three alternative “variants” or sub-dialects/pronunciations (Ekavian, Ikavian, and Ijekavian), as well as differences in lexis and linguistic culture (e.g., in attitudes toward popular speech as the basis for the standard). In addition to this, the standardization in Serbia had proceeded along divergent lines since its independence in 1878. In 1913 Jovan Skerli´c, a Serbian linguist, thus attempted to resolve the major differences by proposing a compromise whereby the Serbs would give up the Cyrillic for the Latin script while the Croats would switch from the Ijekavian to the Ekavian “variant” (dominant in northern Serbian urban centers of Belgrade and Novi Sad), but despite some attempts this never received broad support in Croatia. Furthermore, concurrently with King Alexander’s drive for a tighter union and with government support, another prominent Serbian linguist, Aleksandar Beli´c, published in 1930 an orthographic manual for Serbo-Croatian as an attempt to implement Skerli´c’s proposal with regard to pronunciation choice in Serbian favor. Needless to say, this was

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opposed by most Ijekavian speakers (which included Bosniaks, Bosnian and Croatian Serbs, Croats, and Montenegrins), but only the Croats had any political clout to resist the Serbs. This was a prelude to a period of rapidly worsening inter-ethnic relations, particularly between the Serbs and Croats, which culminated in Yugoslav capitulation after a brief war with Nazi Germany and the formation of a Croatian fascist puppet state (NDH) in 1941. Eager to dissociate Croatian from Serbian because of the (perceived) implications of a close association for Croatian national identity, the ultra-nationalist NDH government moved immediately upon its establishment to declare Croatian as a separate language and embarked upon an aggressive program of re-standardization, switching from the common phonetic to an etymological spelling and introducing numerous archaisms and neologisms alike, among other innovations. Subsequently, it also embarked upon an equally aggressive campaign of ethnic cleansing which culminated in the genocide against the Croatian Serbs, Jews, and Roma, as well as heavy persecution of other groups such as Croatian Communists. At the same time, the Yugoslav Communist Party guerilla force, which was composed of members of all ethnic groups, was gaining strength; headed by Josip Broz Tito, the Partisans first founded the second Yugoslav state in 1943 and then defeated both the German and Italian occupiers and their mostly Croatian and Serbian ultranationalist collaborators (Ustashas and Chetniks). The subsequent language policy of the Communist government is widely considered to have been committed to equality among the constituent peoples (i.e., ethnic groups) and tolerance of minorities, although it was not immune to certain problematic compromises (for a problematization of this view, see Duncan, 2016). In accordance with its ideology of pan-ethnic “brotherhood and unity”, the second Yugoslavia eventually reinstated the common Serbo-Croatian standard as the official language, while also recognizing Slovene and Macedonian, as well as a number of minority languages such as Albanian; Bosniaks and Montenegrins were left out again, however.10 In order to resolve some of the old issues and chart a new course, a new language summit was held in 1954 in Novi Sad, Serbia. Again, as in 1850, the meeting in Novi Sad included only Serbian and Croatian linguists and literary figures. The compromise agreement they reached, known as the Novi Sad Agreement, consisted of ten conclusions concerning status and corpus planning (for the original text and an English translation of that agreement, see Greenberg, 2004/2008, pp. 172–174). The

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agreement established a bi-centric new standard: now officially named Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian, it would have two equal “variants”, an Eastern/Ekavian and a Western/Ijekavian one (i.e., Serbian and Croatian), with equal use of the two scripts (Latin and Cyrillic) throughout. Also agreed upon was joint codification work on new orthographic manuals, grammars, and dictionaries, as well as terminology development. Some Croatian linguists have argued that Serbo-Croatian never really existed (e.g., Bari´c et al., 1999; Katiˇci´c, 1997), whereas Serbian linguists generally reject this claim. Greenberg (2004/2008), for his part, points to the fact that linguistic unification, at least the original one in 1850, was not forced upon the Serbs and Croats by anyone, and this is certainly true (even if this view ignores the fact of the imposition of the linguistic union on the Bosniaks and Montenegrins). However, it is important to note that the historical and political circumstances in the region, the relations between the different ethnic groups, again especially Serbs and Croats, as well as the significance of the language issue, had all drastically changed by 1954. This time, Serbian and Croatian linguists produced what now seems a mere tactical agreement, likely expecting that it would not last. And, of course, it didn’t. Some twelve years later, in 1966, first an unauthorized dictionary of Serbian with clear nationalist and anti-Communist overtones was published (Moskovljevi´c, 1966), then, a year later, the Croats responded by issuing the “Declaration on the Name and Position of the Croatian Literary Language”, which was a direct challenge to the Serbo-Croatian common standard; the joint codification work that was underway would soon stop. Despite a swift intervention by the federal authorities, who rightly saw this turn of events as a threat to ethnic relations in Yugoslavia, the writing was on the wall: the project of unification was over and it was only a matter of time before Serbian and Croatian parted ways once more. Greenberg (2004/2008, p. 32, see also Tollefson, 2002) cogently notes that this language conflict was symptomatic of a more general restructuring of the federal state, which was moving toward decentralization; de jure devolution of a number of important powers from the federal to the republic (i.e., state) level was finally enshrined in the 1974 rewriting of the constitution, which proved to be a major rallying point for Serbian nationalism. In terms of language policy, this is particularly significant because the new constitution devolved also language policy to the level of individual federal states (i.e., republics), effectively opening the door to the introduction of a polycentric standard. This

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was, of course, seized upon by Croatia, but equally importantly, also by the authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro, who had had no voice in any of the previous decisions.11 Of course, official federal policy, which in the Communist-run Yugoslavia had the force of dogma, made it impossible to change the name of the language from Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian into anything else, but new standard varieties were nevertheless introduced under the euphemistic label ‘standard linguistic idiom’. Mindful of the ethnic heterogeneity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the republic’s authorities opted for a pan-ethnic standard (Ivanova, 2012) which included elements from the idioms of all three major ethnic groups (Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs) but was anchored in the idiom of the Bosniaks as the largest group, some elements of which in their turn had come to be shared by Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats (e.g., frequent use of Turkish loans in everyday speech); both scripts remained in use and retained an equal status.12 However, a faction in the Serbian intellectual elite interpreted this development as a threat both to the integrity of Yugoslavia and the ethnic identity of their co-ethnics outside Serbia, who made up a sizeable minority in Croatia and roughly a third of the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The conflict would simmer more or less quietly until a forceful resurgence of open nationalism after the Yugoslav Communist Party relinquished power and called free, democratic elections in 1990. The “contrastive self-identification” between the different ethnic groups mentioned above was on full display during the election campaigns of 1990, while languages as the cornerstones of ethnonational identities were, indeed, “waved as flags”. Needless to say, such a development did not bode well for the federation and the issue of the political future of the country became “the question of all questions” during the campaigns and particularly in the wake of the elections. As the largest ethnic group spread over several republics and one that was effectively in control of the federal state as well as overrepresented in the oversized federal military, Serbs stood to lose the most from a dissolution of Yugoslavia; everyone else stood to gain their independence. These positions proved to be irreconcilable in the ensuing round of negotiations on the future of the federation by the newly elected presidents of the republics. With Yugoslav Army’s support, Serbian leadership then attempted a coup, which failed. The resulting stalemate was broken by a declaration of independence by Slovenia, Croatia, and Macedonia in 1991, followed

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by Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992; Montenegro remained in a federation with Serbia until 2006 when it too regained independence. With the exception of Bosnia and Herzegovina where this issue was more complicated on account of its ethnic heterogeneity,13 each newly independent country declared its majority language official and the unified SerboCroatian standard thus formally ceased to exist (see Sudetic, 1993 for a contemporary report). Having firm control over the powerful Yugoslav military, the Serbs rejected these declarations of independence, turning political into military conflicts with war flaring up first in Slovenia, then in Croatia, and finally in Bosnia and Herzegovina.14 After a series of wars, including the longest and particularly vicious Bosnian War which culminated in a twin aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina by Serbia and Croatia and genocide against the Bosniaks by the Serbs, the former Yugoslavia metamorphosed into seven independent states, each with its own language policy, replacing Serbo-Croatian with Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian as official languages in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatian in Croatia, Montenegrin (plus the other three) in Montenegro, and Serbian in Serbia (see Bugarski, 2004b; Greenberg, 2017/2018).

1.3

Language, Identity, and Ethnonationalism in Contemporary West Central Balkans

It is clear from the discussion above that despite roughly a century and a half-long history of unification attempts, Central South Slavic has always been and remains a polycentric language (cf. Kordi´c, 2010). At the same time, this polycentricity and the right to codify and particularly name varieties has been fiercely contested since the nineteenth century by the Serbian and Croatian intellectual elites, which have, with varying degrees of success, continually and intensely ideologized the “common” language in order to manipulate ethnonational identities on the basis of purportedly objective scientific theories of language and nationalism. Hence, it has been of little consequence that: A potentially classical example to disprove the existence of objective criteria of nationhood is a comparison between the Serbs and Croats, on the one hand, and the Flemish and the Dutch, on the other. In the Serbian-Croat case, existing linguistic differences (underscored by a different orthography) have become highly symbolic for the discontinuity, whereas in the Flemish-Dutch case (where the linguistic differences are of almost exactly

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the same type and degree) language is the main symbol of cultural unity. On all other accounts, the differences are completely analogous as well – history (Ottoman rule for Serbia versus Spanish rule for Flanders, resulting in long periods of political separation from Croatia and Holland, respectively) and religion (Orthodox versus Catholic in the one case, Catholic versus Protestant/Calvinist in the other). (Blommaert & Verschueren, 1998, p. 199)

As noted above, similar to the rest of Eastern Europe the peoples of the Balkans have embraced an essentialist Western language ideology which views language as the embodiment of the character of the “natural” group that created it, i.e. the nation (see Bauman & Briggs, 2000). Consequently, language has been a primary site for the construction of and struggle over ethnonational identity and the concomitant group rights as “ideologies that appear to be about language, when carefully reread, are revealed to be coded stories about political, religious, or scientific conflicts” (Gal, 1998, p. 323). This is evident in public and scholarly discourses on language both in Europe and in the Balkans. In a study of the role of language in European nationalist ideologies, Blommaert and Verschueren (1998), for example, note that “the absence of the feature ‘distinct language’ tends to cast doubts on the legitimacy of claims to nationhood” (p. 192). Furthermore, as Irvine and Gal (2000) argue: [in] the political contestation surrounding contrasting scholarly claims [i]n Macedonia, linguistic relationships came to be used as authorization for political and military action that changed sociolinguistic practices, thereby bringing into existence patterns of language use that more closely matched the ideology of Western Europe. (p. 60)

But it would be naïve, of course, to think that Western ideology has been merely passively adopted. As localizations of the contemporary Western discourse on terrorism in the Serbian and Croatian press (Erjavec, 2009) show, Western ideologies are also appropriated and function on the basis of ‘fractal recursivity’ (Irvine & Gal, 2000, p. 38) to serve specific local purposes. As Irvine and Gal (2000) further contend, “[t]he continuing intensity of contestation” over language and ethnonational identity is thus: hardly surprising, given the consequences envisaged and authorized by the reigning language ideology and occasionally enacted under its auspices.

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It is an ideology in which claims of linguistic affiliation are crucial and exclusivist because they are also claims to territory and sovereignty. (p. 72, my italics)

Seen in this light, the continuing Serbian (and in the case of the Bosnian language, also Croatian) refusal to recognize other groups’ ownership rights, including the right to name their language (see Tošovi´c, n.d., for a rationalization of this contestation), become rather transparent. Although, as we have seen, language (ideological) debates have continued throughout the period of the “joint” language development, the period between 1990 and now is especially significant because it has seen the end of the Serbian (and Croatian) linguacultural hegemony and an unraveling of the “common” standard, particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro. These processes have been reflected in and partly constituted by discourses produced for and directed at the public “as a language-based form of political legitimation” (Gal & Woolard, 2001, p. 4). What is still missing in this particular case, however, is large-scale empirical attestation of these dominant ideologies in order to determine their specific contents and modi operandi. The contestation continues as identity and nationhood continue to be negotiated, often in intense public debates around a variety of issues and events of varying degrees of importance, as outlined above. Underlying these debates and the broader negotiation of ethnonational identities and inter-ethnic relations are language ideologies, for the present purposes best defined as “the cultural system[s] of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests” (Irvine, 1989, p. 255). Because they function as a mediating link between linguistic and social practices, language ideologies are “not about language alone” (Woolard, 1998, p. 3). Rather, they often serve as tools for the invention of tradition which makes possible the ‘imagined community’ of the nation (Anderson, 2016), especially through deployment in formative public institutions such as print media (Habermas, 1962/1991). For this reason, Silverstein (1998), for example, points to the discursive practices in institutions as especially productive for the study of language ideology. Available research suggests that mass media, and newspapers in particular, are a primary site for discursive and ideological reproduction in modern societies (e.g., Fowler, 1991; see also papers in Johnson & Ensslin, 2007). Studies of language ideology thus often focus on public institutional discourses and those of newspapers in

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particular, as “newspapers are self-conscious loci of ideology production” (DiGiacomo, 1999, p. 105) as well as “key sites for language ideological debates between various kinds of social actors” (Ensslin & Johnson, 2006, p. 155). In other words, despite a steady decrease in readership, press coverage continues to both reflect and represent a major stream of influence in the formation of elite and public opinion alike (DiMaggio et al., 2013, pp. 573–575). Finally, if we accept the view of newspapers as a discourse community with which the audience identifies, it follows that “their average lexicon shapes, describes and expresses what is accepted by [the] community” itself (Bassi, 2010, p. 209). This latter point is particularly important for a lexical approach to dominant public language-related discourses and language ideologies proposed in this study. The principal goal of this study is to investigate the links between language ideologies and ethnonationalism, focusing on mainstream newspapers published in Serbia as the largest and historically most influential Central South Slavic nation.15 Language ideologies have been closely related to nationalist discourses since the inception of nationalism and the one-nation-one-language-one-territory trope (e.g., Bauman & Briggs, 2000). They continue to be important for the construction and maintenance of national identities in Europe and elsewhere, and in evidence in media and social media discourse (e.g., Blackledge, 2002; Blommaert & Verschueren, 1998; Ensslin & Johnson, 2006; Johnson & Ensslin, 2007; Johnson & Milani, 2010; Meeuwis, 1993; Subtirelu, 2013; Vessey, 2016, 2017, 2021; Wiese, 2015; Wright & Brookes, 2019). Public languagerelated discourse in West Central Balkans in the last twenty-five years has been dominated by a debate over the ownership of the common language and concomitant contestation of ethnonational identities which are still widely regarded in this area to rest on linguistic distinctiveness but also ethnolinguistic authenticity as a source of political authority (cf. Woolard, 2016). Although relevant research has examined language debates (e.g., Blommaert, 1999) and the links between language ideology and national identity in plurilingual and multicultural societies (e.g., Canada, Vessey, 2016, 2017, 2021 and Spain/Catalonia, Pujolar, 2007, Woolard, 2016), little attention has been paid to contexts with minimal linguistic differences between groups such as West Central Balkans (but see Tollefson, 2002), particularly from a quantitative or mixed-methods perspective. This study is an attempt to close that gap by using a novel mixed-methods approach to identify and describe dominant public language-related discourses and language ideologies in contemporary Balkans.

1

INTRODUCTION

15

The remainder of the book is organized as follows. Chapter 2 offers an overview of the central theoretical concepts, including ethnonationalism, language ideology, and discourse, as well as a brief discussion of the current research context. Chapter 3 outlines the data, methods employed, and the research design, while Chapters 4 and 5 offer a discussion of the quantitative and qualitative results of the analysis, organized by method. Dominant language-related discourses and language ideologies identified in this study are detailed and their role in the construction of ethnolinguistic identities explained in Chapter 6. The conclusions, implications, and reflections follow in Chapters 7 and 8.

Notes 1. For a critical review of the literature on the evolution of a symbol system that is arguably what makes homo sapiens unique, see Luuk (2013). 2. The demise of the former Yugoslavia has unleashed a regional culture of contestation so pervasive that it can, not unreasonably, be characterized as pathological. This has meant the politicization of virtually everything from relatively insignificant borderland areas between Slovenia and Croatia to the identity and the very name of Macedonia which continue to be contested by Bulgaria and Greece (cf. Kamusella, 2018; Voss, 2006); the virus, to continue the medical metaphor, has easily infected the regional academic production, particularly in linguistics. Greenberg (2004/2008) himself thus notes that often such works, “given the ethnic affiliation of their authors, are subjective and at times lack the scholarly rigor required in the study of linguistics” (p. 4; see also Irvine & Gal, 2000, pp. 67– 68; Lindstedt, 2016; Tollefson, 2002). This situation has necessitated a reliance on outside sources, unaffiliated with any of the parties in the region, so Kordi´c (2010), for example, relies heavily on extra-regional sources, particularly those published in the German-speaking world. At the same time, as Greenberg also notes, little relevant material is available in English, while also the treatments in other languages (e.g., Gröschel, 2009), curiously enough, often exhibit obvious and disqualifying biases and are therefore not relied upon here (see Katiˇci´c, 1997 for a possible explanation). 3. As is well known, Slovenia and Croatia were part of various Austrian and Hungarian kingdoms between roughly the twelfth century and 1918, Serbia and Montenegro were part of the Ottoman Empire between the middle of the fifteenth century and 1878, while Bosnia and Herzegovina was part of both, belonging to the Ottoman Empire between the middle

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4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

of the fifteenth century and 1878, and to the Austro-Hungarian Empire comparatively briefly between 1878 and 1918. Partly owing to the policies of the Ottoman Empire which recognized faiths rather than ethnicities among its subjects, there is a close association between religious and ethnic identities in the Balkans. By definition, therefore (religious) Croats are Catholic (religious) Serbs and Montenegrins Eastern Orthodox, while (religious) Bosniaks are Muslim. This was further reinforced first in 1971 and, ultimately, in 1974 in the Yugoslav constitution which recognized the non-Christian, non-Jewish Bosnians as a separate ethnonational group but one defined by its religious affiliation rather than ethnic identity, Muslims (as opposed to their now official ethnonym, Bosniaks). During that time, the area was still divided between the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, but Serbia, in particular, exploited the increasing weakness of the Ottoman Empire to quickly move towards full independence. Serbia and Montenegro were finally granted independence by the great European powers at the Berlin Congress in 1878, while Bosnia and Herzegovina was placed under the administrative rule of the AustroHungarian Empire to be annexed in 1908; Croatia remained part of Austria-Hungary until the end of World War I in 1918. The first mention of the name Serbo-Croatian in a codification work, according to Greenberg (2004/2008, p. 54) came in 1867, in Pero Budmani’s Serbo-Croatian Grammar (see also Katiˇci´c, 1997, p. 171). Although Montenegro had been independent since 1878, it was annexed by Serbia shortly after the end of World War I. Advancing her thesis that Serbo-Croatian/Croato-Serbian is one polycentric language rather than several different languages, Kordi´c (2010), counter to virtually all Croatian linguists, contends that Serbian domination of the common standard is “a myth”. However, while this may be true to a large extent for Croatia, it is patently untrue for Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro (see Note 9). In addition, her insistence on the exclusionary, if historical, name for the language, i.e. Serbo-Croatian/Croato-Serbian, is rather telling. I.e., South-Slavia, a name which symbolically incorporates all Southern Slavs (except Bulgarians). One should note, however, that for many nonSerb former Yugoslavs this name has come to index Serbian domination and hegemony. The existence of separate Bosniak and Montenegrin (ethnonational) identities was disputed by the Croats and particularly by the Serbs, who since at least the time of Vuk Karadži´c, the nineteenth-century Serbian language reformer, had disputed the existence of any other separate Central South Slavic ethnolinguistic identities including the Croatian, arguing, as Karadži´c did, that the Croats and Bosniaks were “Serbs of

1

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

INTRODUCTION

17

the Catholic and Islamic faiths”, respectively. For details on Vuk Karadži´c, see Note 1 in Chapter 4. Not only did no Bosniak or Montenegrin linguists or literary figures participate in either the Vienna or Novi Sad agreements (see, e.g., Völkl, 2002, p. 216), Conclusion 7 of the Novi Sad agreement literally reads, “[…] A mutually (sic!) agreed-upon Commission of Serb and Croat experts will develop a draft of the Orthographic manual. […]” (Greenberg, 2004/2008, p. 172, my italics). This was strictly enforced as all children were taught and required to use both scripts in elementary school, while all public institutions were required to display dual-script signs and use both scripts in their dayto-day operation. An illustrative example of this latter practice is the alternating use of the two scripts by the leading national daily Oslobodjenje, which published in the Latin script one day and in the Cyrillic script the next. After the Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats declared their languages to be Serbian and Croatian, respectively, Bosniaks reverted to the historical designation for the language of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had first been upheld then abruptly abandoned by Austria-Hungary, declaring their language to be Bosnian in the face of opposition from the other two groups which continues to this day. Montenegro chose not to declare independence at that time and instead sided with Serbia in the subsequent wars. Macedonia was spared a military conflict until a brief civil war with its Albanian minority in 2001. Kosovo, long a southern Serbian province with a large Albanian majority, was recognized as an independent state in 2008 after a brief 1999 war with Serbia and a NATO intervention which forced the Serbian military out. Obviously, a comprehensive account of language-related discourses and language ideologies in the entire region of West Central Balkans would require the examination of public discourse on language in the other three nations, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Montenegro, also. However, at the time this research was conducted (2013–2015) comprehensive data was available and obtainable for Serbia only. It should also be noted that this data set proved sufficient to demonstrate the methodological approach outlined in this book.

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CHAPTER 2

Central Theoretical Concepts and the Current Research Context

Abstract Ideology, discourse, and nationalism have a range of notoriously contested meanings. This chapter provides a discussion of essential literature to aid with this semantic quagmire and establish a conceptual apparatus to be used in the remainder of the book. The first section discusses nationalism and then narrows the focus to the historically specific understanding of nationalism in the Balkans. The second section delves into the concepts of ideology and language ideology, briefly examining their historical origins, as well as relevant theoretical approaches, conceptualizations, and definitions, providing a brief history of scholarly engagement with the latter throughout the twentieth century. The third section of the chapter, examines the concept of discourse. The last section offers a condensed survey of the major strands of empirical research into discourse and ideology, with a specific focus on studies of language ideologies relying on a combination of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. Keywords Romantic/ethno-nationalism · (Language) ideology · Discourse · Corpus linguistics · Critical discourse analysis

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Ajši´c, Language and Ethnonationalism in Contemporary West Central Balkans, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72177-0_2

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Ideology, discourse, and nationalism are all multifaceted terms and often hotly contested concepts with a range of divergent meanings across social sciences and humanities, which necessitates precise definition of each of these central theoretical concepts before any data analysis and interpretation can be undertaken. This chapter provides a discussion of essential literature to aid with the semantic and conceptual quagmire and establishes a conceptual apparatus to be used in the remainder of the book. The first section briefly discusses the general concept of nationalism and narrows the focus to the historically specific understanding of (ethno)nationalism in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The second section delves into the general concept of ideology, examining its historical origins, as well as relevant theoretical approaches, conceptualizations, and definitions. This is followed by a discussion of the more specific concept of language ideology, providing a brief history of scholarly engagement with it throughout the twentieth century, as well as a discussion of strategically selected theoretical approaches, and a guide to the many conceptualizations and definitions. The third section of the chapter, examines the concept of discourse, again providing a brief historical trajectory, and conceptualizations and definitions relevant to this discussion. This book is based on an empirical corpus linguistic study of links between language ideologies and ethnonationalism. As such, it is part of a tradition of empirical work in this area stretching roughly four decades back to Michael Silverstein’s (1979) seminal study. With an eye towards theoretical and methodological contextualization, the last section of this chapter offers a condensed survey of the major strands of empirical research into discourse and ideology, with a specific focus on studies of language-related discourses and language ideologies relying on a combination of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, which represents the methodological underpinning to the present study, including what I term traditional approaches to the study of discourse and ideology spanning linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and critical discourse analysis, and the most recent research employing cutting-edge multivariate statistical techniques such as exploratory factor analysis and topic modeling. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of the gaps existing in the currently available literature that this research aims to fill.

2

CENTRAL THEORETICAL CONCEPTS AND THE CURRENT …

2.1

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Ethnonationalism

As we shall see below, similar to discourse and ideology, nationalism is a problematic concept and a complex social phenomenon that defies simple definitions (cf. Jayet, 2020). To make things even more complex, definitions and understanding of nationalism depend on definitions and understanding of related concepts such as nation, nation-state, and ethnicity, which are often similarly problematic (for comprehensive discussions of these concepts in relation to language, see, e.g., Barbour, 2000; Fishman, 1997; Fought, 2006; Garcia, 2012; Haque, 2015; Kamusella, 2018; May, 2001; Safran, 1999). However, theorists often distinguish between ‘civic’ or ‘state’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalisms. Civic or state nationalisms are defined by their affiliation with nations and nation-states which are not necessarily culturally homogeneous (cf. Staats- or Willensnation; for a discussion, see Wodak et al., 1999), whereas ethnic nationalisms are defined by affiliation with (or aspirations toward the formation of) nation-states based on ethnies or pre-existing cultural groups that have a common myth of origin and share history, basic cultural practices, language, and often religion (cf. Kulturnation, ibid.). This basic difference is also often encoded in the distinction between conceptions of people as “demos (conceived of as a community of political membership that is relatively expansive and reflective of Enlightenment notions of democracy) and ethnos (understood as a limited community of birth or cultural belonging, a concept often traced to central European romanticism)” (Hajdarpaši´c, 2015, p. 19). Historically, ethnic nationalism has clearly been the more important of the two in the Balkans (Carmichael, 2000; Hajdarpaši´c, 2015; Kamusella, 2018), the example of the temporarily successful civic or state (Communist) nationalism of the second Yugoslavia (1945–1991) notwithstanding. Ethnonationalism is thus understood here simply as an enterprise to define and pursue the (perceived) political interests of a nation (whether only self-declared or also recognized as such by others) and/or its state defined in exclusivist ethnic terms. Importantly, however, partly because of the regional political culture (Hroch, 2006) and partly because nationalist projects are ultimately impossible to complete (Hajdarpaši´c, 2015), the ethnic nationalism in the Central South Slavic area has always been, continues to be, and is best understood as Romantic nationalism. Romantic nationalism can be defined as “the celebration of the nation (defined by its language, history, and cultural character) as an inspiring ideal for artistic expression; and the instrumentalization of that expression

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in ways of raising the political consciousness” which originally “took shape Europe-wide between 1800 and 1850” (Leerssen, 2013, p. 9). Despite some reservations towards the concept and the term (see Hroch, 2006), Romantic (ethno)nationalism has long been common currency in public and academic discourses in the Balkans alike, partly because “a certain irrationality and strong emotionality [are] present in both Romanticism and nationalism” (Hroch, 2006, p. 18), and, as we shall see, the ideas and historical figures of Romantic nationalism, or national Romanticism, remain highly relevant today.

2.2

Language Ideology

The concept of ideology originates from the late eighteenth century. The term was coined by the French philosopher Destutt de Tracy who, in typical Enlightenment fashion, conceived of ideology as a positivistic science of ideas based in physiological sensations (a branch of zoölogy), optimistically hoping to arrive at a full understanding of the human mind and achieve a rational organization of society (Eagleton, 1991; Silverstein, 1998; Woolard, 1998; see also Aarsleff, 1982). As both Silverstein and Eagleton note, however, similar to many other terms ending in “-ology” the meaning of ideology quickly shifted from “field-of-scientific-study” to “object-of-scientific-study” (Silverstein, 1998, p. 139, Note 1) and thus from “scientific study of human ideas” to “systems of ideas themselves” (Eagleton, 1991, p. 63). Complicating matters further, over time the term has developed “a whole range of useful meanings, not all of which are compatible with each other” (Eagleton, 1991, p. 1; see also Blommaert, 2005). Different authors emphasize different aspects of this semantic and conceptual quagmire. The literature on ideology is vast, spanning many different fields and research traditions, so what follows is perforce a selective treatment (for surveys, see, for example, Eagleton, 1991; Thompson, 1984; van Dijk, 1998). Woolard and Schieffelin (1994) point to two basic divisions in the study of ideology, which are also applicable to the study of language ideology. The first concerns the truth value of ideology and differentiates between neutral and critical uses of the term, whereby neutral views of ideology are ideational and all-encompassing (i.e., “all cultural systems of representation”), whereas critical views of ideology are instrumental and particularistic (i.e., “aspects of representation and social cognition with particular social origins”). This is paralleled

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by Blommaert’s theoretical distinction between ideology as “a generalizing phenomenon characterizing the totality of a particular social or political system, and operated by every member or actor in that system” and ideology as “a specific set of symbolic representations […] serving a specific purpose, and operated by specific groups or actors” (2005, p. 158, italics in the original). Recognizing this basic division between “the wider and narrower senses of ideology”, Eagleton (1991, p. 3), on the other hand, points also to interpretations of ideology as “illusion, distortion and mystification” (i.e., concerned with the truth value of ideology) and those instead “concerned with the function of ideas within social life” (i.e., the metapragmatics of ideology). Most authors seem to agree that there is a further general distinction to be made between the competing views of ideology: that between views of ideology as a cognitive, ideational phenomenon (i.e., “group-schemata”, Blommaert, 2005, p. 162) existing below the level of discursive consciousness, and those which see ideology as a materialist phenomenon, a set of signifying practices arising from lived relations (Althusser, 1971). This latter point is particularly important for the second division in the study of ideology as noted by Woolard and Schieffelin, which is epistemological and concerns what they call “the siting of ideology”. In their own words, “[a]lthough ideology in general is often taken as explicitly discursive, influential theorists have seen it as behavioral, pre-reflective, or structural, that is, an organization of signifying practices [which need not be linguistic] not in consciousness but in lived relations” (Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994, p. 58). Put differently, depending on one’s viewpoint, traces of ideology can be located either in explicit manifestations of discursive consciousness (i.e., metapragmatic commentary, cf. Silverstein, 1993), or they must be inferred from the totality of lived relations in a particular community (e.g., linguistic usage or other signifying practices). It will be noted that this distinction has methodological implications for the study of ideology as well as language ideology which are most pertinent here. As a consequence of the multiplicity of contributions from different fields, research traditions, and political positions noted above, definitions of ideology abound. I rely here on the account provided by Terry Eagleton in his widely cited book Ideology: An introduction (1991). Eagleton makes a distinction between “descriptive”, “pejorative” (cf. neutral vs. critical above) and “positive” definitions of ideology. He goes on to formulate “descriptive” definitions of ideology as those that

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view ideology as “belief-systems characteristic of certain social groups or classes, composed of both discursive and non-discursive elements”; “pejorative” definitions of ideology as those that view ideology as “a set of values, meanings and beliefs which is to be viewed critically or negatively” because it legitimates an unjust social order; and “positive” definitions of ideology as those that view ideology as “a set of beliefs which coheres and inspires a specific group or class in the pursuit of political interests judged to be desirable” (Eagleton, 1991, pp. 43–44). Woolard (1998) cites the anthropologist Clifford Geertz and sociologist Karl Mannheim as two of the most prominent advocates of a “descriptive” understanding of ideology as the totality of social knowledge and a medium of meaning for social purposes. But, as she also notes, the chief criticism of such conceptions of ideology is that they neglect power relations, which is precisely the focus of the “pejorative” definitions. Perhaps the most widely cited, but now also most widely rejected pejorative definition (see Eagleton, 1991, especially pp. 10–26), is of ideology as “false consciousness”, originally put forward by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their book The German Ideology. This understanding of ideology implies an accommodation and acquiescence on the part of the proletariat to the bourgeois hegemony (Gramsci, 1971) such that members of the working class are unable to identify their true class interests due to their adherence to the bourgeois worldview. Similar to this is Thompson’s (1984, p. 4) definition of ideology as “essentially linked to the process of sustaining asymmetrical relations of power – to maintaining domination […] by disguising, legitimating, or distorting those relations.” Importantly for the present purposes, however, one should note that what is understood as “an unjust social order” and “political interests judged to be desirable” will, of course, depend on one’s ideological position and thus presents a problem of its own, especially in an environment of pathological ethnonationalist contestation of identity such as that of contemporary Balkans. Although, as Silverstein (e.g., 2000) himself has noted, the leading early twentieth century American anthropologists and linguists such as Franz Boas, Leonard Bloomfield, and Edward Sapir did consider the issue of language ideology only to dismiss it as inconsequential, the emergence of the study of language ideology is now commonly dated back to his own work, and his seminal 1979 paper “Language structure and linguistic ideology” in particular (see Blommaert, 2006a; Kroskrity, 2004; Woolard, 1998). Kroskrity (2004) outlines briefly but usefully the

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history of twentieth-century structuralist neglect of speaker awareness and the non-referential functions of language in both anthropology and linguistics, pointing to the work in the fields of ethnography of communication and interactional sociolinguistics by prominent figures such as Dell Hymes and John Gumperz as an important precedent for the later work in language ideology. On account of this neglect (which de Beaugrande, 1999, contends is due to “scientism”) and in contrast to ideology, language ideology as a subfield of academic inquiry emerged only in the last two decades of the twentieth century and is “still under construction” (Blommaert, 2006b). Furthermore, it does not, as Woolard and Schieffelin (1994) have noted, yet have a single core literature, although one is beginning to coalesce primarily in linguistic anthropology (see Cavanaugh, 2020; Gal & Woolard, 2001; Kroskrity, 2000b, 2015; Schieffelin et al., 1998; Wilce, 2010; Woolard, 2016, 2020). There has also been a parallel and related research program in the framework of critical discourse analysis, which has examined the role of language in contemporary capitalist societies from a critical perspective (e.g., Blackledge, 2005; Blommaert, 2005; Fairclough, 2001; van Dijk, 1998; Wodak, 2012), as well as a number of contributions from applied linguistics generally and language policy and planning in particular (e.g., Blackledge & Pavlenko, 2002; Blommaert, 1999; Fitzsimmons Doolan, 2019; Jaffe, 1999; Lippi-Green, 2007; McGroarty, 2008, 2010; Ricento, 2000; Vessey, 2021). Research into language ideology has been as multifarious as research into ideology itself, similarly spanning many different fields and research traditions. Woolard and Schieffelin (1994) and Woolard (1998) provide wide-ranging overviews of some of the most important earlier work in the contributing fields and research traditions. These include ethnography of speaking, multilingualism, literacy studies, historiography of linguistics, as well as linguistic anthropology, language contact, colonial studies, sociology, and, perhaps most importantly for present purposes, language policy, language politics, and studies of identity and nationalism. An important, albeit sometimes fuzzy, dividing line here has been between research foregrounding the dialectic between language ideology and social life, and research foregrounding the dialectic between language ideology and the linguistic system itself (e.g., Dirven et al., 2001; Seargeant, 2009; Silverstein, 1979). Note that, on account of my focus on public discourses and the role of language ideology in the (re)construction and maintenance of contemporary ethnolinguistic

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identities, I am primarily concerned here with the former and will not be devoting much attention to the latter, even if the two are certainly complementary and could be combined fruitfully (for an example, see Irvine & Gal, 2000). Again, similar to ideology, definitions of language ideology abound, reflecting different conceptualizations and emphases. Silverstein (1979, p. 193) originally defined language ideologies as “sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use.” Most other definitions are less concerned with language structure, however, and beliefs about language, more often than not, are tacit and can only be inferred by analyzing actual language-related practices and decisions (McGroarty, 2008). Definitions of language ideology also differ in scope. Rumsey (1990) thus offers a very general definition of language ideologies as “shared bodies of commonsense notions about the nature of language in the world” (p. 346). Somewhat more narrowly, Seargeant understands language ideology as “entrenched beliefs about the nature, function, and symbolic value of language” (2009, p. 346). Spolsky (2004), on the other hand, focuses on the pragmatic aspects of language ideologies as belief systems which determine language attitudes, judgments, and behavior. Curiously, then, many definitions of language ideology seem to be in the “neutral” camp, seemingly eschewing the issue of power relations and their implication on the understanding of language ideology. Contrary to this trend, and more in line with my own view, Irvine (1989) sees language ideology as “the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests” (p. 255), while Errington (2001) makes this even more explicit by referring to language ideologies as “situated, partial, and interested […] conceptions and uses of language” (p. 110). Interestingly, although these last two definitions are not quite neutral in the above sense, exhibiting as they do a critical awareness of the necessary social situatedness of any ideology, they nevertheless stop short of fully articulating this particular aspect of the concept. Further, perhaps due to the general poststructuralist distaste for any, even remotely essentialist notions, there is no mention here of “illusion, distortion and mystification” or “false consciousness” (but see Spitulnik, 1998, especially p. 164). This is not to say that research into language ideology is generally unaware or neglectful of power. On the contrary, it seems fair to say that virtually all treatments of language ideology, whatever their foci, pay

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careful attention to power and its implications. A good example of this is the collection of essays in Blommaert (1999), which anchors analysis in the power-laden concept of (political) debate. This is further illustrated by some of the conclusions reached thus far in the research on language ideology. Syntheses of research into language ideology speak of “features” or “dimensions” and “levels of organization” (Kroskrity, 2000a, 2004). Kroskrity (2004, pp. 501–509) identified five such levels of organization of language ideology that emerged from the existing literature, three of which clearly indicate the centrality of the concern with power relations in language-ideological research: (1) group or individual interests (i.e., “language ideologies represent the perception of language and discourse that is constructed in the interest of a specific social or cultural group”); (2) multiplicity of ideologies (i.e., “language ideologies are profitably conceived of as multiple because of the plurality of meaningful social divisions”); and (5) role of language ideology in identity construction (i.e., “language ideologies are productively used in the creation and representation of various social and cultural identities [such as] nationality and ethnicity”). But even after we recognize that despite the apparent definitional shortcomings, language-ideological research does, of course, incorporate power relations, the fact remains that there is a tendency, at least in definitions, to treat language ideology as a static phenomenon (a set of existing, given beliefs, notions, ideas or conceptions). Thus, we may know what a particular language ideology is (if, of course, we can agree on a shared understanding of it), but we are less sure of how it operates. However, language ideology, as Spitulnik (1998) points out, is both conceptual and processual, and so our attention must be redirected to specific languageideological practices. When we adopt such a sociolinguistically dynamic view, we begin to understand language ideologies not only as “ideas with which participants and observers frame their understandings of linguistic varieties” but also as processes through which they “map those understandings onto people, events, and activities that are significant to them” (Irvine & Gal, 2000, p. 35), at which point we can finally consider their effects and consequences. Language ideology too is a contested concept with a range of divergent meanings in humanities and social sciences (e.g., Eagleton, 1991). Following Irvine (1989, p. 255), language ideologies are understood here as “the cultural system[s] of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests.” More

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specifically, “language ideologies represent the perception of language and discourse that is constructed in the [political-economic] interest of a specific social or cultural group” (Kroskrity, 2000b, p. 8, my emphasis). The use of the plural here reflects a concern with different social positions from which language ideologies emanate as well as different aspects of the object of ideologization (e.g., script, accent, etc.). As with discourses, dominant language ideologies are understood to be hegemonic, i.e. espoused from positions of power for the purpose of maintenance of that power, whether naturalized or contested (cf. Kroskrity, 1998). Language ideologies, therefore, are operationalized in this study as implicit or explicit beliefs about language and its relationship to society underlying dominant language-related discourses.

2.3

Discourse

As already noted, discourse is a multifaceted term with a range of divergent meanings in social sciences and humanities. The traditional (structuralist) definition of discourse in linguistics is simply “language above the sentence or above the clause” (Stubbs, 1983, p. 1) or “language in use” (Brown & Yule, 1983). Michel Foucault, however, added a sociocognitive aspect to the term, defining it as “practices which systematically form the objects of which they speak” (1972, p. 49). It is this difference that prompted James Gee (2010, p. 34) to make a distinction between discourses with a small ‘d’ (“language-in-use”) and discourses with a big ‘D’ (language-in-use plus “socially accepted associations among ways of using language”) which is sometimes used to differentiate between the two main understandings of discourse. Foucault’s definition was elaborated by Norman Fairclough (e.g., 2010, p. 59) who conceptualizes discourse in terms of three interrelated dimensions: text, discoursal practice (text production, distribution and consumption), and social practice. In addition, as can be seen from Gee’s definition, it is possible to conceive of discourse, not as a more or less coherent product of social and semiotic “practices” and thus a singular noun as in Foucault’s case, but as a phenomenon with a multitude of manifestations and therefore a plural noun. Although this plural understanding of discourse has gained currency in both social sciences and humanities, more often than not it is implicit and left undefined. Most pertinently for our purposes here, Baker (2006) draws on several sources to expand upon the original Foucault’s

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definition and add a plural dimension to it, so I reproduce his account in full, [D]iscourse is a “system of statements which constructs an object” (Parker, 1992, p. 5) or language-in-action (Blommaert, 2005, p. 2). It is further categorized by Burr (1995, p. 48) as a “set of meanings, metaphors, representations, images, stories, statements and so on that in some way together produce a particular version of events… Surrounding any one object, event, person, etc., there may be a variety of different discourses, each with a different story to tell about the world, a different way of representing it to the world. Because of Foucault’s notion of practices, discourse therefore becomes a countable noun: discourses (Cameron, 2001, p. 15). So around any given object or concept there are likely to be multiple ways of constructing it […]. (Baker, 2006, p. 4)

Taking this definition as a starting point, discourses are understood here as more or less coherent systems of statements which construct the object of which they speak (e.g., language) or an aspect thereof from a particular social or cultural position with the goal of upholding the political interests associated with this position. A discourse may be said to be ideological to the extent that it reproduces or challenges unequal relations of power between social subjects (Fairclough, 2010). Depending on their social effects, discourses can thus be either dominant/hegemonic (reproducing domination) or emancipatory/counter-hegemonic (challenging domination). Language-related discourses are discourses thus defined which primarily pertain to language rather than other aspects of social reality. They are operationalized, as we shall see below, as (a) individual factors resulting from factor analysis, and sets of factors clustering together (small ‘d’ discourses), and (b) broader sets of statements about linguistic and social relationships that extend across factor, cluster, and textual boundaries and have identifiable ideological functions (big ‘D’ discourses).

2.4

The Current Research Context

Existing research into language ideology is largely interdisciplinary and can be classified broadly into one of three main thematic foci: language ideology and language education (e.g., Hornberger & McKay, 2010); language ideology and identity, ethnicity, and nationalism (e.g., Kroskrity, 2000b); and language ideology and social justice (e.g., Blackledge &

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Pavlenko, 2002). However, it should be noted that these often overlap as language-in-education policies, for example, can have implications for ethnic and national identities as well as social justice (e.g., Lippi-Green, 2007). The theoretical and methodological orientations are similarly heterogeneous. Perhaps due to the influence of (critical) discourse analysis, the theoretical approaches have been eclectic and often unsystematic, drawing on and combining a wide range of theoretical frameworks from various disciplines. The methodological approaches have been predominantly qualitative (ethnography, historiography, discourse analysis, and linguistic-philosophical and linguistic-theoretical analyses), but an increasing number of studies are taking a mixed-methods approach, combining corpus-linguistic techniques and forms of (critical) discourse analysis (see Baker et al., 2008; Partington, 2003 for now classic examples, as well as Taylor & Marchi, 2018 for a more recent overview). Overall, research into discourse and language ideology, at least in applied linguistics, seems to be moving away from predominantly qualitative methods and theoretical and macro-level questions toward mixed methods and methodological and micro-level questions focusing on localized contexts. Typically, the results of quantitative, corpus-based analysis are used to identify patterns in the data which are worth pursuing further, as well as to “downsample” the corpus data to a size manageable by a human analyst. Quantitative analysis is then combined with appropriate micro and macro discourse-analytical techniques in a hermeneutic circle, whereby the results of quantitative analysis lead to qualitative analysis; the qualitative results are then checked for reliability using quantitative methods (Baker et al., 2008, p. 295; Fairclough, 2010; Partington, 2003; van Dijk, 2006; Wodak, 2009; for examples, see Mautner, 2007; Subtirelu & Baker, 2018; Vessey, 2013a). This is perhaps a good point to pause briefly to define corpus linguistics, a major component of the methodological approach adopted in this study. Put simply, corpus linguistics is an area of linguistic study in which research is based on corpora or principled collections of authentic, machine-readable text. Principled here means that (spoken/transcribed or written) texts are collected and corpora compiled in a way that ensures representativeness of the target linguistic variety (e.g., American English) or language use domain (e.g., social media). The basic analytical principle is item (word, grammatical feature, etc.) frequency, which is used as the basis for all corpus linguistic techniques. The basic theoretical premises underlying corpus linguistic research are that language use is not

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random and frequency of occurrence is not accidental. Rather, frequency of occurrence is taken as an indicator of what is characteristic of language use in any given domain and both quantitative (statistical) and qualitative (interpretive) methods are applied to identify and describe patterns in real-world language use. Corpus linguistics is applicable to nearly all research areas within linguistics and its popularity and impact have been steadily rising across the field (good introductions to the field include Biber et al., 1998; McEnery et al., 2006; for an accessible introduction to using corpus linguistics in discourse studies, see Baker, 2006). (Critical discourse analysis is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3.) Corpus-based or corpus-assisted studies of discourses and ideologies have employed a variety of methodological approaches, ranging from a reliance on simple frequency lists and concordances of lexical items or phrases to focus essentially qualitative analyses (e.g., de Beaugrande, 1999; Johnson & Suhr, 2003) to keywords and collocates of core search terms (and related techniques such as n-gram analysis) to multivariate statistical techniques such as exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and topic modeling (TM). The methodological mainstay, however, has largely been a routine reliance on either keyword or collocation analysis, or some combination of the two, sometimes supplemented with n-gram (phraseological) analysis. Studies based on keyword analysis typically focus on a limited number of high-scoring items regardless of the actual number of items identified as key, which are then further examined using concordances (e.g., Baker, 2004; Subtirelu, 2013). Similarly, studies based on collocation analysis typically focus on limited sets of collocates of a search term, also followed up by examinations of sample concordance lines (e.g., Baker et al., 2013; Mautner, 2007; Orpin, 2005).1 In most cases, however, researchers have combined these two techniques, typically employing collocation analysis as a follow-up procedure to further examine selected keywords (e.g., Mautner, 2005; Taylor, 2010; Vessey, 2017). Other studies have also combined collocation or keyword analysis (including key semantic domains) with examinations of phraseology (including key phrases/clusters) rather than single-item collocations (e.g., Cheng & Lam, 2013; Subtirelu, 2013). What characterizes all these approaches, perforce, is their reliance on researcher inference and a degree of reductiveness on account of the inherent limitations of these analytical techniques (cf. Murakami et al., 2017).

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In an effort to ensure a higher degree of objectivity, reliability, and generalizability, recent studies have increasingly sought to automatize the process of corpus profiling and identification of appropriate, principled foci for follow-up qualitative analysis by employing multivariate statistical techniques such as EFA and TM. EFA was first used for these purposes in a study of language ideologies in the Arizona Department of Education policy discourse (Fitzsimmons Doolan, 2014), but, there, analysis was limited to attributive, adjectival collocates, whereas discourse as a material manifestation of ideology was bypassed altogether by treating sets of co-occurring collocates as indicators of ideologies rather than discourses. Similar to the methodology proposed here, Ajši´c (2016), in an examination of LRDs and LIs related to English in Bosnia and Herzegovina, employed factor analysis in conjunction with other corpus techniques for triangulation purposes. Most recently, EFA was also used to detect representations of national cultures (Berber Sardinha, 2019; see also Berber Sardinha, 2020 which relies on cluster analysis). TM, on the other hand, has been used to automatize large-scale corpus profiling. Murakami et al. (2017), for example, used it to create a general thematic profile of a specialized corpus of academic English, while DiMaggio et al. (2013) employed TM to map, from a sociological perspective, a specialized corpus of newspaper articles discussing US government support for the arts. Adopting a more critical approach, Törnberg and Törnberg (2016a) combined TM and CDA in an effort to uncover discursive links between Islamophobia and anti-feminism in Sweden in thematic discourses identified in a large corpus of social media posts. Further examples include studies examining the discursive treatment of Muslims in social media in the West (Törnberg & Törnberg, 2016b) and corporate social responsibility (Jaworska & Nanda, 2016). All of these studies have so far shown that multivariate statistical techniques have advantages over the more traditional, heuristic methods, in that they offer a more or less automatic analysis of the entirety of data in a corpus that can be statistically validated (but see Brookes & McEnery, 2019 for a dissenting opinion). However, TM requires researcher inference early in the analytical process as the number of lexical sets (i.e., topics), for instance, must be somewhat arbitrarily specified in advance, which represents a limitation compared to EFA where this is determined via a much less arbitrary interpretation of a scree plot resulting from

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the factorization of data, for example. Nevertheless, similarities between TM and EFA are considerable, so the relative effectiveness, as well as advantages and limitations, of either approach remain to be determined in dedicated comparative studies (see Ajši´c, 2020). Although, as we can see, there is a growing body of research that relies on corpus linguistics to study discourse (for an overview, see a metanalysis of the research in the last ten years in Nartey & Mwinlaru, 2019; see also Ancarno, 2020), corpus-based (or corpus-assisted or corpus-driven) studies explicitly concerned with language ideology are still relatively rare (e.g., Ajši´c, 2015, 2016, 2021; Ensslin & Johnson, 2006; Fitzsimmons Doolan, 2009, 2011, 2014, 2019; Freake, Gentil & Sheyholislami, 2011; McEntee-Atalianis & Vessey, 2020; Subtirelu, 2013, 2015; Vessey, 2013a, 2013b, 2016a, 2016b, 2017; Wright & Brookes, 2019). The general goal here, then, is to offer a contribution to this literature from the perspective of a relatively small language (Central South Slavic) as well as a linguapolitical context of minimal linguistic differences but maximal ideological contestation (West Central Balkans). Further, and more specifically, this study aims to address several theoretical and methodological gaps existing in the currently available literature. It is well known that corpus linguistics research, including studies of discourse and ideology, was developed in English and has also disproportionately focused on English and a small number of major European languages. At the same time, extensive inflectional morphology presents a number of corpus-linguistic challenges that are largely absent from studies of languages such as English. Therefore, the first gap has to do with the paucity of corpus-based research into languages such as Central South Slavic which are considerably structurally different from English. The second gap is related to the first and has to do with geolinguistic focus. Much of recent research has examined language debates (Blommaert, 1999) and the links between language ideology and national identity in plurilingual and multicultural societies (e.g., Canada, Vessey, 2013a, 2016a, 2016b, 2021; Finland, Hult & Pietikäinen, en 2014; Spain/Catalonia, Pujolar, 2007; Woolard, 2016), but little attention has been paid to languages and contexts other than the major European ones (but see Wilce, 2010). This study will therefore contribute to the growing body of literature on language ideology by focusing on a hitherto unexamined case (Central South Slavic) and context (West Central Balkans). Third, although various quantitative methods (e.g., keyword analysis,

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collocation analysis, exploratory factor analysis, topic modeling) have been used in discourse and ideology studies, there have as of yet been few attempts to compare them (Baker & Egbert, 2016; Brookes & McEnery, 2019). So, this research will compare and contrast the results obtained through the application of several methods in terms of their usefulness and effectiveness for the study of language-related discourses and language ideologies. The fourth, and final, gap has to do with synchronic variation between different discursive sites. We will therefore compare language-related discourses and language ideologies based on the distinction between ‘discursive’ and ‘practical’ consciousness (Kroskrity, 1998, 2004 following Giddens, 1979) by contrasting general newspaper articles (written by journalists and/or experts) with letters-to-the-editor (largely lay opinion). In Chapter 3, we look at the data and methods used to identify language-related discourses and language ideologies in this study.

Note 1. It should be noted, however, that recent research (see Brezina, 2018) has greatly extended the range of statistical tools that can be applied in corpus linguistics, including a variety of new measures of keyness, association strength, and effect size which make these analytical techniques ever more effective and reliable.

References Aarsleff, H. (1982). From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the study of language and intellectual history. University of Minnesota Press. Ajši´c, A. (2015). Language ideologies, public discourses, and ethnonationalism in the Balkans: A corpus-based study (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ (UMI No. 3705442). Ajši´c, A. (2016). English, “polyglot” politicians and polyglot businessmen: Language ideologies in contemporary Bosnian press. In L. Buckingham (Ed.), The status of English in Bosnia and Herzegovina (pp. 159–202). Multilingual Matters. Ajši´c, A. (2020, May). Large-scale lexical patterns in discourse as indicators of ideologies: Comparing exploratory factor analysis and topic modeling. Paper presented at ICAME 41 (Language and Linguistics in a Complex World: Data, Interdisciplinarity, Transfer, and the Next Generation), Heidelberg, Germany.

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Fitzsimmons Doolan, S. (2014). Using lexical variables to identify language ideologies in a policy corpus. Corpora, 9(1), 57–82. Fitzsimmons Doolan, S. (2019). Language ideologies of institutional language policy: Exploring variability by language policy register. Language Policy, 18, 169–189. Foucault, M. (1972). The archeology of knowledge. Tavistock. Fought, C. (2006). Language and ethnicity. Cambridge University Press. Freake, R., Gentil, G., & Sheyholislami, J. (2011). A bilingual corpus-assisted discourse study of the construction of nationhood and belonging in Quebec. Discourse & Society, 22(1), 21–47. Gal, S., & Woolard, K. A. (Eds.). (2001). Languages and publics: The making of authority. St. Jerome. Garcia, O. (2012). Ethnic identity and language policy. In B. Spolsky (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of language policy (pp. 79–99). Cambridge University Press. Gee, P. J. (2010). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method. Routledge. Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in social theory: Action, structure and contradiction in social analysis. University of California Press. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Lawrence & Wishart. Hajdarpaši´c, E. (2015). Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and political imagination in the Balkans, 1840–1914. Cornell University Press. Haque, E. (2015). Language and nationalism. In N. Bonvillain (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of linguistic anthropology (pp. 317–328). Routledge. Hornberger, N. H., & McKay, S. L. (Eds.). (2010). Sociolinguistics and language education. Multilingual Matters. Hroch, M. (2006). National Romanticism. In B. Trencsényi & M. Kopeˇcek (Eds.), National Romanticism: The formation of national movements discourses of collective identity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770–1945 (Vol. 2, pp. 4–18). Central European University Press. Hult, F. M., & Pietikainen, S. (2014). Shaping discourses of multilingualism through a language ideological debate: The case of Swedish in Finland. Journal of Language and Politics, 13(1), 1–20. Irvine, J. T. (1989). When talk isn’t cheap: Language and political economy. American Ethnologist, 16(2), 248–267. Irvine, J. T., & Gal, S. (2000). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In P. V. Kroskrity (Ed.), Language regimes: Ideologies, polities, and identities (pp. 35–83). School of American Research Press. Jaffe, A. (1999). Ideologies in action: Language politics on Corsica. Mouton de Gruyter.

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Jaworska, S., & Nanda, A. (2016). Doing well by talking good: A topic modelling-assisted discourse study of corporate social responsibility. Applied Linguistics, 39(3), 373–399. Jayet, C. (2020, September 30). Is nation ‘one of the most puzzling and tendentious items in the political lexicon’? [Blog post]. http://senjournal.co. uk/2020/09/30/blog-post-is-nation-one-of-the-most-puzzling-and-tenden tious-items-in-the-political-lexicon/?s=03. Johnson, S., & Suhr, S. (2003). From ‘political correctness’ to ‘politische Korrektheit’: Discourses of ‘PC’ in the German newspaper. Die Welt. Discourse & Society, 14(1), 49–68. Kamusella, T. D. (2018). Nationalism and national languages. In J. W. Tollefson, & M. Pérez-Milans (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language policy and planning (pp. 163–182). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780190458898.013.8. Kroskrity, P. V. (1998). Arizona Tewa Kiwa speech as a manifestation of a dominant language ideology. In B. B. Schieffelin, K. A. Woolard, & P. V. Kroskrity (Eds.), Language ideologies: Practice and theory. Oxford University Press. Kroskrity, P. V. (2000a). Regimenting languages: Language ideological perspectives. In P. V. Kroskrity (Ed.), Language regimes: Ideologies, polities, and identities (pp. 1–34). School of American Research Press. Kroskrity, P. V. (Ed.). (2000b). Language regimes: Ideologies, polities, and identities. School of American Research Press. Kroskrity, P. V. (2004). Language ideologies. In A. Duranti (Ed.), A companion to linguistic anthropology (pp. 496–517). Blackwell. Kroskrity, P. V. (2015). Language ideologies: emergence, elaboration, and application. In N. Bonvillain (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of linguistic anthropology (1st ed., pp. 95–108). Routledge. Leerssen, J. (2013). Notes towards a definition of Romantic Nationalism. Romantik, 2, 9–35. Lippi-Green, R. (2007). English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. Routledge. Mautner, G. (2005). The entrepreneurial university: A discursive profile of a higher education buzzword. Critical Discourse Studies, 2(2), 95–120. Mautner, G. (2007). Mining large corpora for social information: The case of elderly. Language in Society, 36, 51–72. May, S. (2001). Language and minority rights: Ethnicity, nationalism and the politics of language. Pearson. McEnery, T., Xiao, R., & Tono, Y. (2006). Corpus-based language studies: An advanced resource book. Routledge. McEntee-Atalianis, L., & Vessey, R. (2020). Mapping the language ideologies of organizational members: A corpus-linguistic investigation of the United Nations’ General Debates (1970–2016). Language Policy, 19, 549–573.

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McGroarty, M. (2008). The political matrix of linguistic ideologies. In B. Spolsky & F. M. Hult (Eds.), The handbook of educational linguistics (pp. 98–112). Blackwell. Murakami, A., Thompson, P., Hunston, S., & Vajn, D. (2017). What is this corpus about?: Using topic modelling to explore a specialised corpus. Corpora, 12(2), 243–277. Nartey, M., & Mwinlaru, I. N. (2019). Towards a decade of synergising corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis: A meta-analysis. Corpora, 14(2), 203–235. Orpin, D. (2005). Corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis: Examining the ideology of sleaze. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 10(1), 37–61. Partington, A. (2003). The linguistics of political argument: The spin-doctor and the wolf-pack at the White House. Routledge. Pujolar, J. (2007). The future of Catalan: Language endangerment and nationalist discourses in Catalonia. In A. Duchêne & M. Heller (Eds.), Discourses of endangerment: Ideology and interest in the defence of languages (pp. 121–148). Continuum. Ricento, T. (Ed.). (2000). Ideology, politics and language policies: Focus on English. John Benjamins Publishing. Rumsey, A. (1990). Wording, meaning and linguistic ideology. American Anthropologist, 92(2), 346–361. Safran, W. (1999). Nationalism. In J. A. Fishman (Ed.), Handbook of language & ethnic identity (pp. 77–93). Oxford University Press. Schieffelin, B. B., Woolard, K. A., & Kroskrity, P. V. (Eds.). (1998). Language ideologies: Practice and theory. Oxford University Press. Seargeant, P. (2009). Language ideology, language theory, and the regulation of linguistic behavior. Language Sciences, 31, 345–359. Silverstein, M. (1979). Language structure and linguistic ideology. In R. Clyne, W. Hanks, & C. Hofbauer (Eds.), The elements: A parasession on linguistic units and levels (pp. 193–247). Chicago Linguistic Society. Silverstein, M. (1993). Metapragmatic discourse and metapragmatic function. In J. A. Lucy (Ed.), Reflexive language: Reported speech and metapragmatics (pp. 33–58). Cambridge University Press. Silverstein, M. (1998). The uses and utility of ideology: A commentary. In B. B. Schieffelin, K. A. Woolard, & P. V. Kroskrity (Eds.), Language ideologies: Practice and theory (pp. 123–145). Oxford University Press. Silverstein, M. (2000). Whorfianism and the linguistic imagination of nationality. In P. V. Kroskrity, (Ed.), Language regimes: Ideologies, polities, and identities (pp. 85–138). School of American Research Press. Spitulnik, D. (1998). Mediating unity and diversity: The production of language ideologies in Zambian broadcasting. In B. B. Schieffelin, K. A. Woolard, & P.

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CHAPTER 3

Data and Methods

Abstract This chapter opens the empirical part of the book. Here, we take a detailed look at the data (i.e., research and reference corpora), methods, and the research design (an inventory of the analytical techniques employed, as well as their sequencing). The quantitative portion of the analysis is based on a pair of comprehensive, specialized research (11.6 million words) and comparator (22.4 million words) newspaper corpora compiled from 16,000 and 37,000 articles, respectively. In addition to this information, the first section also provides details on data collection and downsampling procedures. The second section briefly outlines each analytical technique used and the research design as a whole, including the epistemological approach comprising a synergistic combination of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. Keywords Corpora · Downsampling · Research design · Epistemology

3.1

The Corpora

The specialized research corpus compiled for this study, SERBCORP, comprises articles containing one or more instances of any of the lemma forms of the word jezik ‘language’ from four leading national newspapers, two dailies (Blic, a tabloid, and Politika, a broadsheet) and two © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Ajši´c, Language and Ethnonationalism in Contemporary West Central Balkans, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72177-0_3

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weeklies (NIN, Vreme) published in Serbia in the period between 2003 and 2008.1 The publications were selected based on three criteria: type (broadsheets vs. tabloids, dailies vs. weeklies), circulation figures, and relative standing in the Serbian and regional publics. Because full data sets were only accessible for the period between 2003 and 2008 (with the exception of Politika for the year 2007), the data set is limited to the years 2003–2006 and 2008. Similarly, SERBCOMP, the comparator corpus, comprises articles from Blic, NIN , Politika, and Vreme published in the period between 2003 and 2014. The two corpora were compiled by downloading the relevant articles from the Serbian online media archive Ebart (http://www.arhiv.rs) as follows.2 After the target publications had been identified, publicationspecific searches were run for articles containing any of the inflectional forms of the core concept nominal lemma jezik ‘language’ (and, ˇ perforce, the adjectival lemma jezicki ‘linguistic’) by using the search term ‘jezi*’ and the chosen timeframe. Using a custom Python program, relevant articles thus identified were automatically saved according to source, date of publication, and download rank (e.g., POL-22-7-200655) to give them unique identifiers. Similarly, using the search term ‘NOT jezi*’, SERBCOMP was compiled from randomly chosen articles not containing any forms of either one of the two core concept lemmas. This procedure produced a pair of relatively large corpora representative of the target discourse: SERBCORP comprised a total of 11,656,247 tokens from 16,148 articles, while SERBCOMP comprised a total of 22,493,804 tokens from 37,227 articles. Crucially, however, preliminary analyses performed on SERBCORP, including keyword analysis (see Ajši´c, 2015, pp. 215–220) suggested the section comprising articles with five or more hits for the lemma language as the optimal research corpus for an investigation of links between language-related discourses (LRDs) and language ideologies (LIs), and ethnonationalism (problem-oriented corpus). The 5+ hits section of SERBCORP (henceforth 5+ SERBCORP) comprised a total of 1,118,454 tokens from 1,257 articles (Table 3.1). Similarly, preliminary keyword analyses with 5+ SERBCORP as the research corpus and SERBCOMP and the section of SERBCORP comprising articles with up to four hits for the lemma language (1–4 SERBCORP, Table 3.2) as comparator corpora, showed that 1– 4 SERBCORP was the more effective comparator corpus for teasing out lexis related to ethnolinguistic identities (see Ajši´c, 2015, pp. 67– 75, 221–223). Therefore, all subsequent analyses were performed on 5+ SERBCORP as the research corpus and 1–4 SERBCORP as the comparator corpus.

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Table 3.1 Composition of 5+ SERBCORP Publication Blic NIN Politika Vreme Total

No. of tokens

% of tokens

No. of articles

% of articles

148,492 280,281 588,605 101,076 1,118,454

13.28 25.06 52.62 9.04 100.00

164 184 847 62 1,257

13.05 14.64 67.38 4.93 100.00

Table 3.2 Composition of 1–4 SERBCORP Publication

No. of tokens

% of tokens

No. of articles

% of articles

Blic NIN Politika Vreme Total

1,852,111 2,006,060 5,224,904 1,454,656 10,573,731

17.52 18.97 49.41 13.76 100.00

3,273 1,577 9,081 960 14,891

21.98 10.59 60.98 6.45 100.00

3.2

Methods and Research Design

This study took a lexical, mixed-methods approach to the identification of LRDs and LIs, combining corpus linguistics (CL) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) in a manner broadly similar to that originally proposed by Baker et al. (2008). Further, similar to Baker and Egbert (2016), I also included a variety of CL techniques for triangulation purposes, comparing them in terms of their relative advantages for identification of relevant LRDs and LIs. As in many corpus-based studies of discourse, I began data analysis with keyword and collocation analysis. What follows is a brief explanation of each technique. Keyword analysis. Corpus-based discourse and ideology research has mostly relied on keyword analysis (in addition to basic corpus-linguistic techniques such as frequency, concordance, and collocation analysis). Keyword analysis has thus been used in a wide variety of discourse studies (see, for example, the essays in Bondi & Scott, 2010) to identify what characterizes a certain text or corpus, as well as to look for differences between parallel texts or corpora. The goal of keyword analysis (Scott, 1997) is the identification of words “which occur with unusual frequency in a given text [or corpus]” (p. 236), i.e. lexical or grammatical features characteristic of research corpora and thus potentially interesting as foci for follow-up analysis. It requires a reference corpus

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in addition to a research corpus and can be carried out automatically using software such as WordSmith Tools. An appropriate reference corpus should be composed of texts in the same language as the research corpus, and is typically expected to be larger than the research corpus, although what its optimal size may be is as of yet unclear (Scott, 2009, 2010). The reference corpora of choice have often been large general corpora (i.e., those comprising different registers) such as the British National Corpus (BNC). However, in the absence of such reference corpora (e.g., for languages other than English) and depending on research questions, comparator corpora (corpora of similar size and register as the research corpus) have been used. Examples include corpora compiled from texts on the same topic reflecting different political or other orientations or corpora compiled from the same types of texts excluding those with the same focus as the research corpus (see, for example, Baker, 2006; Subtirelu, 2015; Vessey, 2013). Once wordlists for both the research and reference/comparator corpora have been compiled, keyword analysis uses a variety of statistical techniques to cross-tabulate each word’s observed frequency and the number of running words in the research corpus with its observed frequency and the number of running words in the reference corpus (Scott, 2014a). This procedure determines which words appear statistically significantly more (or less) frequently in the research corpus as compared to the reference corpus. The result is a statistical measure of a word’s salience in the research corpus reflected in a keyness score which is based on the statistic chosen. A list of keywords calculated for a corpus thus suggests the “aboutness” of that corpus. Keywords can be positive (when they are significantly more frequent in the research as compared to the reference corpus) or negative (when they are significantly less frequent in the research corpus). Whereas positive keywords suggest what a corpus is about, negative keywords can be used as an indicator of what may be missing from it. The resulting keywords can be grouped into semantic fields intuitively by the researcher in order to identify any patterns for further analysis (cf. Baker, 2004; Ensslin & Johnson, 2006). Keyword analysis has been the object of widespread criticism on several grounds and particularly for its dependence on the size and type of reference corpus chosen, as well as the choice of statistic (i.e., questionable reliability). Some researchers argue that larger reference corpora are generally better (e.g., Scott, 2010), while others have suggested that the optimal size for a (specialized) reference corpus may be five times the size

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of the research corpus (Berber Sardinha, 1999, 2004). In contrast, Xiao and McEnery (2005, p. 70) contend that “the size of the reference corpus is not very important in making a keyword list,” particularly when dealing with sufficiently large corpora (cf. Scott & Tribble, 2006, p. 64). Similarly, despite the broad reliance on large general corpora, Culpeper (2009, p. 35) argues that it is better to use a reference corpus which is as close as possible to the research corpus (the approach adopted here) since this approach to keyword analysis avoids a focus on irrelevant stylistic differences between registers and is more likely to produce a keyword list that “reflect[s] something specific to the target [i.e., research] corpus.” At the same time, as Rayson (2008, p. 527) notes, because of the independence assumptions built into the procedure, there should be no overlap between the research and reference corpora. It should be noted, finally, that recent research has extended the range of statistical tools that can be applied in corpus linguistics, including a variety of new measures of keyness, association strength, and effect size which make these analytical techniques ever more effective (see Brezina, 2018; Egbert & Biber, 2019; Gabrielatos, 2018), even if such improvements are not always applicable or necessary. Collocation analysis. In contrast to keyword analysis, collocation analysis examines the co-occurrence patterns between words and does not require a reference corpus. The strength of association between two words is measured by various statistics such as the t-test, and z- and mutual information (MI) scores (McEnery et al., 2006). MI score, the preferred technique in analyses focusing on relatively infrequent items, is calculated by comparing “the probability of observing the two words together with the probability of observing each word independently, based on the frequencies of the words” (Biber et al., 1998, p. 266). A score of 0 means that there is no association between the words, while a score higher than 0 suggests positive association; scores lower than 0 suggest negative association. An MI score of 3 or higher is considered to indicate a significant association (Hunston, 2002, p. 71). Again, unlike keyword analysis, which represents a more general lexical (and discursive) characterization of a corpus, collocation analysis provides an indication of how individual words are used in a corpus. Such patterns can be suggestive of particular discourses and underlying ideologies as “[n]o words are neutral [and] [c]hoice of words represents an ideological position” (Stubbs, 1996, p. 107). Further, in line with the shift in focus in corpus linguistics and applied linguistics research generally to phraseology (see, for example, Biber et al.,

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2004; Chen & Baker, 2010; Gray & Biber, 2013), corpus-based research into discourses and ideologies has examined n-grams (also known as lexical bundles or clusters, i.e. recurring word combinations with an n number of constituents, e.g. jezik i književnost ‘language and literature’; see, e.g., Cheng & Lam, 2013 for a discourse analysis application). Ngram analysis, as it will be referred to here, is useful as recurrent word combinations can be more informative in semantic (and discursive) terms than individual collocates considered in isolation. As with keyword analysis, recent research has introduced updates to existing practices as well as a variety of new techniques such as MI3, for example (e.g., Brezina, 2018). Following keyword and collocation analyses, I turned to multivariate statistical techniques which are based on the results of collocation analysis, including exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and cluster analysis (CA), as well as analysis of variance (ANOVA) where appropriate. Exploratory factor analysis, cluster analysis, analyses of variance. Exploratory factor analysis is a multivariate statistical technique which groups variables into sets called factors based on their covariance (for detailed explanations of EFA, see Loewen & Gonulal, 2015; Phakiti, 2018; Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007; see also Berber Sardinha & Veirano Pinto, 2019). It is particularly useful for explorations of large data sets with numerous variables because it suggests constructs underlying multiple variables, which makes interpretation of complex co-occurrence patterns possible. The application of EFA in applied linguistics was pioneered by Douglas Biber (e.g., 1988, 2006), whose methodology for the analysis of language use based on function-related patterning between large numbers of grammatical and other variables (called multidimensional analysis, MD) has had a significant impact on the study of grammar as well as composition pedagogy, second language acquisition, and other related areas. Although EFA-based multidimensional analysis is used in an increasing number of subfields of applied linguistics (see, for example, the papers in Cortes & Csomay, 2015), it has not, with one exception, been used in studies of discourse and ideology. Fitzsimmons Doolan (e.g., 2011, 2014), however, adapted MD by focusing on the co-occurrence patterns among lexical rather than grammatical features. In her study of language ideologies in the educational sphere in Arizona, she compiled and analyzed a corpus of official language policy documents to identify the collocates of the core concepts language, literacy and English. In the next step, she counted the frequencies of these collocates in all of the texts in her corpus and then subjected those counts to EFA. This resulted in five factors (i.e., groups of collocates that systematically co-occur throughout the corpus) interpretable as different language ideologies on account of

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their indexical links to language-related beliefs and attitudes existing in the social realm. As will be seen below, this is similar to the application of EFA in this study. Cluster analysis is a multivariate statistical technique which can be used to group objects or cases such as individual texts within a data set. It is recommended as a follow-up procedure to EFA because of its ability to identify hitherto unidentified patterns in the data (Staples & Biber, 2015). In this study, cluster analysis is used to explore the differences and similarities between texts based on their variation on three independent variables (publication, year of publication, and article vs. letter-to-the-editor). Finally, the rationale for analysis of variation here was to determine whether there were any statistically significant differences between (a) different outlets in this sample (synchronic variation), (b) time of publication (diachronic variation), and (c) different types of articles (agent variation). Fitzsimmons Doolan (2011, 2014) has shown that mean factor scores can be used to compare observations grouped by what she calls ‘registers’ (i.e., text types) in order to examine any variation between them. Similar to this, I compare outlets, article types, and publication times in terms of how they score on individual factors, and thus discourses, in an attempt to determine whether there are any significant differences in the discursive constructions of language between outlets, ‘lay’ people and ‘experts’, and over time. This initial, predominantly quantitative phase thus included five different corpus-linguistic and statistical analyses which were conducted with the help of WordSmith Tools 6.0 (Scott, 2014b) and the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences 21.0 (SPSS, IBM, 2012), as well as several custom Python and PERL programs. The follow-up, predominantly qualitative phase, in turn, relied on analytical techniques developed within the discourse-historical approach (DHA) to CDA (particularly ‘topoi’, see Reisigl & Wodak, 2009). Critical discourse analysis. Texts, as Fairclough (2010, p. 57) notes, “bear the imprint of ideological processes and structures.” Although, as he further argues, it may not be possible simply “to ‘read off’ ideologies from texts […] because meanings are produced through interpretations of texts and texts are open to diverse interpretations” (ibid.; see also van Dijk, 2006), large-scale corpus-based analysis of frequency can reveal patterns that suggest a cumulative effect of media representations and point to the beliefs and assumptions (i.e., ideologies) that underlie them. According to Stubbs (1996, p. 196), “the study of recurrent wordings is of central importance in the study of language and ideology and can provide empirical evidence [of] how culture is expressed in lexical

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patterns.” Corpus-linguistic tools can thus provide a map of a corpus based on lexical patterns suggesting discourses and underlying ideologies and “pinpointing areas of interest for a subsequent close analysis” (Baker et al., 2008, p. 284). However, as numerous researchers have noted (e.g., Baker et al., 2008; Blackledge & Pavlenko, 2002; Partington, 2010; Ricento, 2006; Vessey, 2017), corpus linguistic analysis, powerful though it is, does not in itself constitute discourse or ideological analysis. Discourses and ideologies do not exist in a vacuum, but rather “work” by establishing links between individual instances of language use and social structures and practices, as well as by making explicit or implicit references to other texts (intertextuality) or other discourses (interdiscursivity). Understanding and interpreting discourses and ideologies, therefore, requires a social, cultural, historical, and political contextualization of lexical patterns uncovered with the help of corpus linguistic tools. With its focus on discourse, ideology and power, as well as a flexible, eclectic methodology (for an overview, see Wodak & Meyer, 2009), critical discourse analysis (CDA) is ideally suited for such analysis and therefore as a complement to quantitative lexical analysis. In the simplest of terms, CDA relies on linguistic analysis of discourse to uncover and expose relations of unequal power in society. In CDA, text is “conceived as a semiotic entity, embedded in an immediate, text-internal co-text as well as intertextual and sociopolitical context,” while discursive and linguistic data is seen “as a social practice, both reflecting and producing ideologies in society” (Baker et al., 2008, pp. 279–280). Similarly, discourse is conceptualized as “a complex of three elements: social practice, discoursal practice (text production, distribution and consumption), and text” (Fairclough, 2010, p. 59). The ultimate goal of CDA, then, is to move from a micro-analytic perspective of text to a macroanalytic perspective of social practice to demonstrate “how language functions in constituting and transmitting knowledge, in organizing social institutions or in exercising power” in different domains/fields in our societies (Wodak, 2004, p. 187). CDA, of course, has been criticized, sometimes severely, on a number of grounds, but particularly for its methodological shortcomings such as selectivity or potential bias in data collection procedures, small samples, and a lack of concern for replicability (e.g., Blommaert, 2005; Stubbs, 1997). Recognizing this, Baker et al. (2008) have proposed a methodological ‘synergy’ between corpus linguistics and critical discourse

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analysis, whereby the two methodological approaches complement one another and thus cancel out each other’s limitations. Although such a synergy does not necessarily guarantee research entirely free of researcher inference (Baker, 2011 cited in Fitzsimmons Doolan, 2014, p. 61), if applied in a principled manner it can demonstrably minimize it (e.g., Fitzsimmons Doolan, 2014). In any case, all language use and all analysis are perforce ideological in the sense that, arguably, ideologically neutral positions are impossible, and as a ‘critical’ approach CDA has always refused to claim ‘objectivity’ (Fairclough, 2001, p. 5). In other words, as Vessey (2017) has noted, the principle of researcher self-reflexivity (e.g., Pennycook, 2001) applies. Although many of the analytical techniques available from the different approaches developed within CDA since its inception could potentially find application here (again, see Wodak & Meyer, 2009 for a methodological overview), they are not all equally useful for our present purpose, which is to examine language ideologies identifiable from languagerelated public discourse and, particularly, the strategies deployed in the negotiation of contested ethnolinguistic identities. The discoursehistorical approach (DHA, Reisigl, 2018; Wodak, 2001, 2004), developed to trace the constitution of a particular stereotypical image in public discourse, however, offers several macro-analytical tools that are potentially useful (cf. Vessey, 2017). DHA draws on argumentation theory to identify several discursive strategies of relevance to the analysis of identity-related discourse such as the referential/nomination strategy (the construction of in- and out-groups through membership categorization by metaphor and metonymy), and predication (justification of positive or negative attributions given to social actors; Wodak & Meyer, 2009, pp. 319–320). Preliminary analysis, however, suggested as particularly relevant and useful the discursive strategy of argumentation (i.e., topoi). Topoi are explicit or inferable obligatory premises which make it possible to connect arguments with the conclusion (Wodak & Meyer, 2009), or simply “the common-sense reasoning typical for specific issues” (van Dijk, 2000 cited in Baker et al., 2008, p. 299). In line with the methodological synergy explicated above, representative texts identified through quantitative analysis were subjected to DHA with the goal of identifying and describing the argumentation strategies (i.e., topoi) and their common frame of reference (i.e., their associated language ideologies). It should be noted, finally, that the research design (Fig. 3.1) was not purely sequential (quantitative-to-qualitative), but rather hermeneutic

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Corpus compilation criteria

Sampling phase I

Reference/comparator corpora

Research corpus

Articles with 1+ hits for jezi* (SERBCORP)

Articles w/o hits for jezi* (SERBCOMP); WAC

Sampling phase II Corpus comparisons > SERBCOMP Articles with 5+ hits for jezi* (5+ SERBCORP) 1-4 SERBCORP Keyword analysis

Collocation and concordance analysis

Exploratory factor analysis

CDA/DHA

Analysis of variance

Cluster analysis

Fig. 3.1 Research Design

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(i.e., alternating between quantitative and qualitative techniques as necessary, cf. Baker et al., 2008; Reisigl & Wodak, 2009) as data was repeatedly examined from both perspectives and the methodological approach further focused and refined (for a concise demonstration of this methodological argument, see Ajši´c, 2021).

Notes 1. For economy of presentation, all primary source material is included in English translation only (all translations are my own). The original Serbian is available from Ajši´c (2015), as well as via the weblinks included in the references for all primary sources cited (Chapters 5–7). 2. It should also be noted that, while Serbian newspapers are printed and/or electronically published in either the Cyrillic or Latin script, and sometimes both, Ebart only offers the Latin version of digitized articles. The two versions, however, are functionally equivalent.

References Ajši´c, A. (2015). Language ideologies, public discourses, and ethnonationalism in the Balkans: A corpus-based study (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ. Ajši´c, A. (2021). Capturing Herder: A three-step approach to identification of language ideologies using corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. Corpora, 16(1). Baker, P. (2004). Querying keywords: Questions of difference, frequency and sense in keywords analysis. Journal of English Linguistics, 32(4), 346–359. Baker, P. (2006). Using corpora in discourse analysis. Continuum. Baker, P., & Egbert, J. (Eds.). (2016). Triangulating methodological approaches in corpus-linguistic research. Routledge. Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., KhosraviNik, M., Krzyzanowski, M., McEnery, T., & Wodak, R. (2008). A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in UK press. Discourse & Society, 19(3), 273–306. Berber Sardinha, T. (1999). Using key words in text analysis: Practical aspects. Direct Papers 42, 1–9. ISSN 1413-442x. Berber Sardinha, T. (2004). Linguistica de corpus. Sao Pãulo. Berber Sardinha, T., & Veirano Pinto, M. (2019). Multi-dimensional analysis: Research methods and current issues. Bloomsbury Academic. Biber, D. (1988). Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge University Press. Biber, D. (2006). University language: A corpus-based study of spoken and written registers. John Benjamins Publishing.

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Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Cortes, V. (2004). If you look at…: Lexical bundles in university teaching and textbooks. Applied Linguistics, 25(3), 371–405. Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Reppen, R. (1998). Corpus linguistics: Investigating language structure and use. Cambridge University Press. Blackledge, A., & Pavlenko, A. (Eds.). (2002). Language ideologies in multilingual contexts [Special Issue]. Multilingua 21(2/3). Blommaert, J. (2005). Discourse: A critical introduction. Cambridge University Press. Bondi, M., & Scott, M. (Eds.). (2010). Keyness in texts. John Benjamins. Brezina, V. (2018). Statistics in corpus linguistics: A practical guide. Cambridge University Press. Chen, Y., & Baker, P. (2010). Lexical bundles in L1 and L2 academic writing. Language Learning & Technology, 14(2), 30–49. Cheng, W., & Lam, P. W. Y. (2013). Western perceptions of Hong Kong ten years on: A corpus driven critical discourse study. Applied Linguistics, 34(2), 173–190. Cortes, V., & Csomay, E. (Eds.). (2015). Corpus-based research in applied linguistics: Studies in honor of Doug Biber. John Benjamins. Culpeper, J. (2009). Keyness: Words, parts-of-speech and semantic categories in the character-talk of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 14(1), 29–59. Egbert, J., & Biber, D. (2019). Incorporating text dispersion into key word analyses. Corpora, 14(1), 77–104. Ensslin, A., & Johnson, S. (2006). Language in the news: Investigating representations of “Englishness” using WordSmith Tools. Corpora, 1(2), 153–185. Fairclough, N. (2001). Language and power (2nd ed.). Pearson Education Limited. Fairclough, N. (2010). Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language. Longman. Fitzsimmons Doolan, S. (2011). Identifying and describing language ideologies related to Arizona educational language policy (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Fitzsimmons Doolan, S. (2014). Using lexical variables to identify language ideologies in a policy corpus. Corpora, 9(1), 57–82. Gabrielatos, C. (2018). Keyness analysis: Nature, metrics and techniques. In C. Taylor & A. Marchi (Eds.), Corpus approaches to discourse: A critical review (pp. 225–258). Routledge. Gray, B., & Biber, D. (2013). Lexical frames in academic prose and conversation. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 18(1), 109–135. Hunston, S. (2002). Corpora in applied linguistics. Cambridge University Press. IBM. (2012). Statistical package for the social sciences [Computer software].

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Loewen, S., & Gonulal, T. (2015). Exploratory factor analysis and principal components analysis. In L. Plonsky (Ed.), Advancing quantitative methods in second language research (pp. 182–212). Routledge. McEnery, T., Xiao, R., & Tono, Y. (2006). Corpus-based language studies: An advanced resource book. Routledge. Partington, A. (2010). Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS) [Special Issue]. Corpora, 5(2). Pennycook, A. (2001). Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction. Routledge. Phakiti, A. (2018). Exploratory factor analysis. In A. Phakiti, P. De Costa, L. Plonsky, & S. Starfield (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of applied linguistics research methodology (pp. 423–457). Palgrave Macmillan, UK. Rayson, P. (2008). From key words to key semantic domains. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 13(4), 519–549. Reisigl, M. (2018). The discourse-historical approach. In J. Flowerdew & E. Richardson (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of critical discourse studies (pp. 44–59). Routledge. Reisigl, M., & Wodak, R. (2009). The discourse-historical approach (DHA). In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis: Theory and method (pp. 87–121). Sage. Ricento, T. (2006). Americanization, language ideologies and the construction of European identities. In C. Mar-Molinero & P. Stevenson (Eds.), Language ideologies, policies and practices. Language and the future of Europe (pp. 44– 57). Palgrave Macmillan. Scott, M. (1997). PC analysis of key words—And key key words. System, 25(2), 233–245. Scott, M. (2009). In search of a bad reference corpus. In D. Archer (Ed.), What’s in word-list? Investigating word frequency and keyword extraction (pp. 79–92). Ashgate. Scott, M. (2010). Problems in investigating keyness, or clearing the undergrowth and marking out our trails… In M. Bondi & M. Scott (Eds.), Keyness in texts (pp. 43–58). John Benjamins Publishing. Scott, M. (2014a). WordSmith Tools Help Manual. Version 6.0. Lexical Analysis Software. Scott, M. (2014b). WordSmith Tools (Version 6.0) [Computer software]. Lexical Analysis Software. Scott, M. R., & Tribble, C. (2006). Key words and corpus analysis in language education. John Benjamins Publishing. Staples, S., & Biber, D. (2015). Cluster analysis. In L. Plonsky (Ed.), Advancing quantitative methods in second language research (pp. 243–274). Routledge. Stubbs, M. (1996). Text and corpus analysis. Blackwell.

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Stubbs, M. (1997). Whorf’s children: Critical comments on critical discourse analysis (CDA). In A. Ryan & A. Wray (Eds.), Evolving models of language (pp. 100–116). Multilingual Matters. Subtirelu, N. C. (2015). ‘She does have an accent but…’: Race and language ideology in students’ evaluations of mathematics instructors on RateMyProfessors.com. Language in Society, 44(1), 35–62. Tabachnick, B. G., & Fidell, L. S. (2007). Using multivariate statistics. Pearson Education Inc. van Dijk, T. A. (2006). Ideology and discourse analysis. Journal of Political Ideologies, 11(2), 115–140. Vessey, R. (2013). Too much French? Not enough French? The Vancouver Olympics and a very Canadian language ideological debate. Multilingua, 32(5), 659–682. Vessey, R. (2017). Corpus approaches to language ideology. Applied Linguistics, 38(3), 277–296. Wodak, R. (2001). The discourse-historical approach. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis (pp. 63–94). Sage. Wodak, R. (2004). Critical discourse analysis. In C. Seale, G. Gobo, J. F. Gubrium, & D. Silverman (Eds.), Qualitative research practice (pp. 197–213). Sage. Wodak, R., & Meyer, M. (2009). Critical discourse analysis: History, agenda, theory and methodology. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis (pp. 1–33). Sage. Xiao, R., & McEnery, T. (2005). Two approaches to genre analysis: Three genres in Modern American English. Journal of English Linguistics, 33(1), 62–82.

CHAPTER 4

Quantitative Results by Method

Abstract This chapter provides a detailed account of the results of quantitative analysis organized by method. The reason for the organization and presentation of results by method is simply that methodological comparison is one of the book’s two main foci. The chapter is subdivided into sections presenting the results of different quantitative corpus-linguistic methods and statistical techniques: keyword analysis, collocation analysis, exploratory factor analysis, analysis of variance, and cluster analysis. Throughout the chapter, the essentially hermeneutic nature of this type of mixed-methods discourse research is demonstrated via a series of examples of how quantitative and qualitative analyses can inform and guide one another. Keywords Triangulation · Hermeneutics · Three-step approach · Thematic discourse

4.1

Keyword Analysis

In line with many corpus-based critical studies of discourse (and ideology), the first (heuristic) technique applied was keyword analysis. Keyword analysis can identify lexis that has a (statistically significant) higher frequency in a research as opposed to a reference corpus, and thus © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Ajši´c, Language and Ethnonationalism in Contemporary West Central Balkans, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72177-0_4

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suggests what is characteristic of the research corpus and can be indicative of the discourses extant in it (e.g., Scott, 1997). The top 30 positive keywords (words statistically significantly more frequent in the research corpus) are shown in Table 4.1. (Negative keywords, words statistically significantly less frequent in the research corpus, did not exhibit any useful discursive patterns and will not be considered here.) Unsurprisingly, the top lemma (rank 1) is language, which reflects the sampling procedure and simply confirms that 5+ SERBCORP indeed represents Table 4.1 Top 30 positive keywords in 5+ SERBCORP Rank

Keyword

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

language Serbian linguistic dictionary school mother (adj.) script Cyrillic word instruction learn Montenegrin English linguist professor literature subject Croatian use (n.) Serbo-Croatian education (profession) education grade literary people Bosniak learning foreign Bosnian students (K-12)

Frequency

Texts

Keyness

12530 7309 901 801 2593 611 1243 590 2633 710 825 696 1220 260 1524 1305 770 684 585 226 563 893 609 1027 1510 223 352 2004 266 637

1118 670 112 135 237 197 169 74 502 107 70 106 271 81 307 269 147 163 72 70 219 187 87 128 234 70 129 265 64 120

18516.54 3799.77 2043.82 1717.42 1269.04 1249.68 1108.27 942.80 879.24 875.24 851.36 849.83 839.02 823.13 775.36 760.37 740.22 729.29 697.87 597.25 574.70 574.07 545.16 541.68 530.86 526.18 497.70 449.44 445.70 419.59

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language-related discourse (LRD). The list includes items related to regional ethnolinguistic identities (rank 2, 12, 18, 26, 29), language use and education (rank 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 30), with some references to literature and translation (rank 4, 16, 24). Importantly, items referring to Central South Slavic (CSS) ethnolinguistic identities are all in the top 30 keywords (rank 2, 12, 18, 26), while a number of other potentially relevant items are also in the list (e.g., rank 7, 8, 20, 29; Table 4.1). Clearly, however, keywords identified for topically heterogeneous research corpora such as 5+ SERBCORP are not as insightful as those identified for topically homogeneous corpora such as single-issue parliamentary debates (Baker, 2006) or student evaluations of university instructors (Subtirelu, 2015), where potential foci for analysis are easier to identify due to a higher degree of topical and discursive homogeneity in the corpus data. Furthermore, despite the identification of potentially pertinent lexical items to explore using concordances and collocates, analysis is often limited to top-scoring keywords, and the decision about the focus of analysis, as in previous research, remains dependent on researcher inference. Complicating matters further still, concordance lines and collocational patterns derived from topically and discursively heterogeneous corpora can be only minimally informative. Let us briefly illustrate the traditional approach which relies on concordance and collocation analysis of a researcher-selected subset of items using two (one in this section and one in the next) of a number of lexical items identified by both procedures as ‘leads’ (i.e., potentially pertinent items), which, because they fall slightly outside of the set of top-scoring items and do not always exhibit obvious patterns, might be overlooked in a traditional analysis. In addition to the obviously important CSS ethno- and glottonyms, keyword analysis identified a number of other leads in this corpus such as, for example, Vuk ( Karadži´c ),1 which at rank 33 is just outside of the top 30 keywords shown here, occurring a total of 482 times in this corpus (for a list of all identified keywords, see Table A.1 in Appendix A). (Note that this same item was also identified as a significant collocate of the lemma jezik.) Vuk ( Karadži´c ) stands out and represents a promising lead because it is the only individual whose name is identified as a keyword in this corpus, and, more importantly, also because Vuk Karadži´c has been historically closely linked to discussions of language and ethnolinguistic identity in the CSS area, which is the primary focus of this study. However, as can be seen, even a single relevant item such

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as this presents the researcher with hundreds of occurrences and concordance lines of potential interest (again, 482 in this case). Indeed, data sets compiled in corpus-based discourse studies are often too large for comprehensive qualitative analysis (as this is understood in CDA), even with the help of quantitative CL techniques. Existing research has dealt with this issue in several ways. To solve the problem of oversampling, Hunston (2002), for example, suggests a downsampling technique based on a random selection of relevant concordance lines. Somewhat similarly, Baker et al. (2008) suggest a focus on what they call ‘consistent collocates’ (items that appear as significant collocates of the core search term throughout the target timeframe rather than over isolated periods within it), whereas Vessey (2013) concentrates precisely on such peaks in discursive activity (around major events), focusing her CL searches on a small set of theoretically-relevant items resulting from previous research. Despite the relative practical and theoretical merits of such downsampling procedures, however, it is clear that they all incur a degree of loss of information that limits any claims to reliability and the generalizability of findings even if the corpora they are applied to are generally representative of the target discourse(s). Here, this problem is exacerbated by the extensive inflectional morphology of CSS in that, unlike in English, for instance, semantic patterns are broken up into numerous subpatterns corresponding to individual lemma forms of both the search term and any collocates (e.g., nacija, nacije, naciji, etc.). This atomizes the overall semantic profile of the lexical item but also renders software designed primarily for languages with simpler inflectional morphologies, such as WordSmith Tools, much less effective. Also, 5+ SERBCORP features articles that are topically (and discursively) rather heterogeneous, which presents an additional challenge for this approach to identification of LRDs and LIs. To return to our example, the significant lexical collocates of Vuk identified here (listed by frequency) are: Karadži´c • reform • Stefanovi´c • language • Serbian • assembly • first • [Petar II Petrovi´c] Njegoš [1813–1851, poet, philosopher, a Prince-Bishop of Montenegro] • [Vuk] Draškovi´c [a Serbian writer and government minister in the early 2000s] • Dositej [Obradovi´c, 1739–1811, Serbian writer, Enlightenment philosopher, and the first Minister of Education of Serbia] • endowment • word • award • linguistic • work • minister • and book. As can be seen, these collocates show no obvious or easily discernible discursive patterns of import for either language ideology or ethnonationalism, other than

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Table 4.2 Key semantic domains in 5+ SERBCORP (by number of items) Rank Language education & science

Rank CSS ethnolinguistic identities

3 5 6 10 11 14 15

linguistic school mother (adj.) instruction learn linguist professor

1 2 7 8 12 18 20

17 19 21

25 26 29

22 23

subject use (n.) education (profession) education grade

30 31 40 43 45 49 54 58 59 60 64 65 71 73 76 78 79 82 83 85 87 90

students (K-12) elementary science class period doctor school (university) exam children knowledge scientific introduction percent academician example sentence Letters (a, b, c…) students (K-8) schooling program/curriculum book parents law

37 39 41 44 50 55 56 57 67 70 74 75 77 80 84 88 89

32 33

Rank Literature Rank Foreign & languages translation

language Serbian script Cyrillic Montenegrin Croatian SerboCroatian people Bosniak Bosnian

9 16 24 27 34 35 36

word literature literary learning culture speech speak

4 13 28 46 52 53 61

dictionary English foreign second German Spanish French

38 42 47

translator translation expression

62 68 69

Russian understand be able to

national Vuk (Karadži´c) minority Croats Serbs Montenegrins label SANU name identity Monte(negro) (Monte)negro nation Vojvodina today same difference history change (v.)

48 51

meaning wrote

63 66 72 81 86

poetry writer cultural poet century

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a vague notion of the historical importance of language as (also) a political issue. It is the fact that Vuk Karadži´c as an influential historical figure from a particular era (i.e., Romanticism, and also roughly contemporary with Herder) is featured so prominently in this corpus rather than any particular concordance or collocational patterns associated with this lexical item that is important here. Put differently, lexical items can have a high discursive and ideological significance without exhibiting any significant concordance and collocational patterns on account of their keyness in a culture in the sense of Williams (1976). This is best examined through a close reading of the texts where they occur, rather than concordance lines, for example, but that approach necessitates identification of representative texts, which can be problematic (cf. cherry-picking, Baker & Levon, 2016). We shall return to this issue further below. In order to get a broader sense of the discursive profile of 5+ SERBCORP all 90 identified keywords were further manually classified into semantic fields based on their predominant semantic values in the corpus (confirmed by an examination of relevant concordance lines). This classification resulted in four distinct semantic fields: language education and science, CSS ethnolinguistic identities, literature and translation, and foreign languages. Table 4.2 lists keywords representative of each domain. This suggests that language-focused Serbian newspaper discourse is dominated by references to language education and science, CSS ethnolinguistic identities, and, to a lesser extent, literature and translation, and foreign languages. From this (and the hermeneutic movement between a variety of analytical techniques and data points as noted in Fig. 3.1), it is possible to infer that this general LRD is focused on contested ([CSS] ethnolinguistic identities) and uncontested (foreign languages, translation) differences and identities, as well as language education and science and literature as the primary sociocultural domains with which language is associated. This is an important finding not only because it gives us an indication of the thematic LRDs in circulation here, but also because it is corroborated by EFA (see further below).

4.2

Collocation Analysis

Collocation analysis, the second heuristic technique applied here, identifies statistically significant patterns of co-occurrence between lexical items, which have proven to be a good indicator of discursive patterns. Collocation analysis of the core search term ‘language’ produced a total of 305

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lemma collocates of the lemma language (for a list of all identified collocates, see Table B.1 in Appendix B). The top 30 lemma collocates of the lemma language in 5+ SERBCORP are shown in Table 4.3. The prominent semantic fields are similar to those resulting from keyword analysis (ethno-/glottonyms, education, literature, foreign languages), with the exception that most high-ranking items here (rank 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 14) suggest more strongly a dominant discourse of construction and maintenance of national identity which foregrounds and juxtaposes references Table 4.3 Top 30 collocates of language in 5+ SERBCORP (by frequency) Rank

Collocate

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Serbian foreign that English mother own speak second itself script literature one all our Croatian Montenegrin learn literary school they official use this instruction new word people year professor culture

MI score

Texts

Frequency

8.80 13.02 7.64 12.63 8.86 7.70 10.26 11.05 5.11 9.19 7.58 6.22 8.24 8.91 8.10 12.77 9.51 9.16 6.97 5.86 14.15 9.35 6.53 8.30 10.26 5.86 7.09 5.36 8.14 8.74

802 346 484 323 296 360 321 307 338 165 220 281 290 257 157 112 175 176 179 245 107 136 211 149 172 180 153 186 145 153

3449 1011 791 693 636 608 552 507 494 457 456 454 406 401 363 351 340 335 318 310 285 274 265 262 254 253 252 239 239 231

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to monolithic monolingual national identities (Serbia, foreign, English, mother, own, second, our, etc.) as well as an attendant language ideology of normative monolingualism. Regional ethnonational identities are similarly prominent (Serbian, rank 1, Croatian, rank 15, Montenegrin, rank 16, as well as Serbo-Croatian, rank 40, and Bosnian, rank 46), while several other frequent items (people, rank 27, plus national, rank 31, name, rank 36, exists, rank 48) again point to the aforementioned discourse of ethnolinguistic contestation. Similar to keywords, however, collocation patterns present the analyst with a wealth of information, which is relatively difficult to explore in an efficient and principled manner. The limitations of concordance and collocation analysis explicated in the previous section notwithstanding, it should be noted that both techniques can still be used effectively in microscopic lexical analysis during the preliminary stages of discursive corpus profiling as well as for the purposes of confirmation or elaboration of macroscopic lexical patterns. For example, the verb postoji ‘exists’ (rank 48, 161 occurrences across 126 texts) was identified as a significant collocate of the lemma jezik. Postoji is a potential lead because it can be an explicit expression of contestation as it is often used with a negator (ne postoji ‘does not exist’) and applied to non-Serbian varieties of Central South Slavic. As can be seen from Fig. 4.1, (ne) postoji ‘(does not) exist’ is indeed applied to Bosnian (lines 2 and 3) and Montenegrin (lines 4, 5, 6, 7) in an explicit manifestation of the discourse of contestation. Interestingly, (ne) postoji is also applied to Serbian (line 16), but this was the only occurrence in conjunction with Serbian which failed to show up in any of the subsequent analyses, including qualitative analyses of integral texts. Similar to keyword analysis above, collocation analysis was followed up by an examination of phraseological patterning separately for each of the forms of the node lemma language; a researcher-selected sample of the most frequent n-grams in 5+ SERBCORP is shown in Table 4.4. This represents an incremental improvement on collocate lists as we can now see the node word in a variety of contexts. If we look at the bigrams here, for instance, we see many of the same lexical items and traces of that same discourse of construction and maintenance of (monolingual) national identity in the (implied) opposition of phrases such as Serbian language, mother tongue, and our language, on the one hand, and the phrases foreign language, English language, and second (foreign) language, on the other. We also note a high prominence of phrases pointing to CSS ethnolinguistic identities: Serbian language, Croatian language, and Bosnian

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Fig. 4.1 Sample concordance lines for Postoji ‘Exists’ in 5+ SERBCORP

language. The top trigrams confirm these patterns, again suggesting a discourse of contestation (e.g., renaming [of the] Serbian language). The top n-grams with four, five and six constituents confirm these and other already attested patterns. In the 4-gram section, we see more evidence of discourses of endangerment (for [the] protection [of the] Serbian language, for [the] defense [of the] Serbian language) and contestation (renaming [of the] Serbian language into), as well as a reference to (pseudo) linguistics (Serbian science [of] language). In the 5-gram section, we see traces of discourses of endangerment (e.g., use [of the] Latin script [of the] Serbian language, preserve [one’s] own language [and] its autonomy, war for [the] Serbian language and), contestation (e.g., rename [the] Serbian language into [the] Montenegrin), ethnolinguistic identity ([one’s] own nationality and [one’s] own language), and references to a key institutional purveyor of many of these discourses ([of the] SANU 2 institute for [the] Serbian language). In the 6-gram section, we see many of the same phrases indicating the same discourses, only in a more complete form, and a phrase pointing to a conception of language in terms of minority ethnocultural rights (Bosnian language with elements of national culture).

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Table 4.4 Sample of the most frequent N-grams in 5+ SERBCORP (by type and frequency) N-gram 2-grams Serbian language Mother tongue Foreign language English language Our language Croatian language Bosnian language Second language 3-grams Language and literature Renaming (of the) Serbian language Language and culture 4-grams Renaming (of the) Serbian language into For (the) protection (of the) Serbian language For (the) defense (of the) Serbian language Serbian science (of) language 5-grams (of the) SANU institute for (the) Serbian language Use (of the) Latin script (of the) Serbian language Preserve (one’s) own language and (its) autonomy Rename (the) Serbian language into Montenegrin (One’s) own nationality and (one’s) own language 6-grams Bosnian language with elements of national culture Association for protection (of) Cyrillic (of the) Serbian language Rename (the) Serbian language into (the) Montenegrin language War for (the) Serbian language and script

Frequency

955 267 258 173 92 81 72 69 149 17 15 15 12 10 7 21 7 6 6 5 13 8 6 5

Again, as can be seen, even a small sample of n-grams presents an amount of information which is not easy to deal with. Further, although we have been able to identify a certain number of patterns pointing to language-related discourses with clear ideological implications such as those of endangerment, institutional control, contestation, and minority rights, we cannot be sure we are not missing anything and, of course, it is still difficult to make an inference-free decision about what to actually focus our analysis on. Also, even if, based on concordance analysis,

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we decided this was enough information to choose a focus, how do we identify the most representative texts for qualitative analysis, for example? The conclusion we can draw from this brief demonstration, then, is that combining keyword, collocation, and concordance analysis, while often effective, is not an ideal solution for the discursive and ideological profiling of topically and discursively heterogeneous research corpora, particularly when researching material in highly inflectional languages. As I show in the following sections, exploratory factor analysis offers a more efficacious method of analysis that can reliably identify not only individual lexical leads, but sets of discursively and ideologically related lexical items (i.e., thematic and ideological discourses) as well as sets of representative texts for in-depth (qualitative) analysis.

4.3

Exploratory Factor Analysis

The application of EFA here is based specifically on Biber (1988) and, to a lesser extent, Fitzsimmons Doolan (2011). As noted in Chapter 3, EFA is a multivariate statistical technique which can automatically identify complex patterns of covariance among variables (in this case, collocates of the node lemma language) and thus discrete coherent sets of lexical items suggestive of discourses (rather than ideologies). However, in contrast to Fitzsimmons Doolan (e.g., 2011, 2014), all 305 collocates of the lemma language in 5+ SERBCORP were included in the analysis here regardless of their syntactic function or their position vis-à-vis the node (cf. macro- or textual collocates). The preferred solution included a total of 12 factors accounting for 34.13% of the total variance in the data (Table 4.5). Factors were interpreted by examining collocate variables with salient loadings (≥ .30), as well as representative texts. To identify texts representative of each factor, factor scores were estimated for each text using regression analysis and z-scores. This was followed by a qualitative analysis of top-scoring texts to confirm and elaborate factor interpretations (for details on these procedures, see Ajši´c, 2015, pp. 54–59, 96–132). As can be surmised from the factor labels, not all identified factors are equally relevant for an analysis of links between language ideologies and CSS ethnonational identities. Despite inevitably exhibiting some discursive and ideological patterns, Factors 1 (‘Language education administration’), 3 (‘School entrance exams’), 7 (‘Literature and publishing’), 9 (‘Foreign language education’), and 12 (‘Linguacultural diplomacy’)

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Table 4.5 Summary of the factorial structure Factor

Collocates

Factor 1 (5.40%)

grade subject compulsory class period elementary study (v.) school (K-12) instructors children elective first instruction teachers students (K-12) curriculum attend foreign education script Cyrillic (n.) use (n.) official Latin Cyrillic (adj.) constitution protection association law exam mathematics high school (gen.) students (K-12) school (K-12) high school (acad.) section

Factor 2 (3.18%)

Factor 3 (3.16%)

Factor loadings

Factor/discourse label

.797 .761 .648 .611 .608 .594 .570 .570 .527 .501 .477 .448 .442 .374 .353 .353 .328 .302 .817 .735 .647 .558 .547 .518 .464 .388 .356 .348 .758 .638 .631 .629 .561 .532 .480

Language education administration

Endangerment and protection of the Cyrillic script

School entrance exams

(continued)

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Table 4.5 (continued) Factor

Factor 4 (2.83%)

Factor 5 (2.72%)

Factor 6 (2.67%)

Factor 7 (2.61%)

Collocates attend knowledge school (univ.) students (univ.) professor philosophy department Nikši´c philology department decision renaming minority Ruthenian Slovak Romanian national Hungarian rights community Croatia Croats Croatian Serbs academy name Serbian Serbo-Croatian war call (v.) book publish writer literary literature

Factor loadings .309 .303 .657 .589 .578 .550 .459 .454 .426 .387 .382 .327 .785 .709 .615 .528 .459 .458 .401 .384 .660 .659 .622 .501 .463 .385 .351 .348 .338 .334 .562 .514 .473 .464 .443

Factor/discourse label

Officialization of Montenegrin 1

Minority language rights

Contestation over common language (CSS) ownership and name

Literature and publishing

(continued)

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Table 4.5 (continued) Factor

Factor 8 (2.61%)

Factor 9 (2.60%)

Factor 10 (2.55%)

Collocates published work part edition poem poetry Montenegrin Montenegro renaming Nikši´c Montenegrins mother (adj.) authorities introduction teach level be able to common instruction foreign framework begin knowledge grade department instructors linguistic linguist SANU dictionary linguistic linguistics scientific Serbian science word

Factor loadings .440 .423 .413 .409 .358 .316 .765 .744 .483 .466 .428 .401 .392 .370 .606 .577 .482 .461 .453 .450 .408 .375 .362 .322 .314 .306 .576 .496 .487 .485 .438 .373 .365 .363 .352 .328

Factor/discourse label

Officialization of Montenegrin 2

Foreign language education

SANU (pseudo)linguistics

(continued)

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Table 4.5 (continued) Factor

Factor 11 (2.10%)

Factor 12 (1.73%)

Collocates standard Serbo-Croatian edition expression Bosnian Bosniak elective element national board center cultural course interest culture institute Belgrade

Factor loadings .317 .317 .314 .311 .804 .669 .523 .477 .395 .351 .469 .421 .394 .391 .377 .362 .349

Factor/discourse label

Officialization of Bosnian

Linguacultural diplomacy

point to texts which discuss language in a general and often more or less ethnolinguistically neutral way and were thus deemed to be of marginal value and will not be discussed further here, except to note how they cluster together below. Factors 2 (‘Endangerment and protection of the Cyrillic script’) and 5 (‘Minority language rights’), which suggest discourses of contestation and endangerment related primarily to non-CSS regional ethnonational identities, were deemed to be indirectly relevant and will therefore be referenced strategically to support the discussion of patterns identified in Factors 4, 6, 8, 10 and 11. Finally, Factors 4 (‘Officialization of Montenegrin 1’), 6 (‘Contestation over common language [CSS] ownership and name’), 8 (‘Officialization of Montenegrin 2’), 10 (‘SANU [pseudo]linguistics’), and 11 (‘Officialization of Bosnian’) point to texts which overtly thematize CSS ethnonational identities and were deemed to be directly relevant to the research questions and thus the proper focus of analysis. For this reason, we shall throughout the remainder of the discussion focus on the pertinent factors (Factors 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and 11) as the most overt manifestations of the ideological discourses of endangerment and contestation, which as we shall see are among the central findings in this study.

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Table 4.6 Top 10 highest scoring articles for Factor 2

Rank

Article

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

POL-11-2-2005-108.txt POL-16-12-2006-100.txt POL-17-6-2004-76.txt POL-16-3-2003-93.txt POL-3-10-2008-168.txt POL-22-8-2006-59.txt POL-21-9-2004-72.txt POL-25-8-2005-27.txt POL-8-4-2005-138.txt POL-16-4-2005-91.txt

Factor score 52.37 50.71 50.32 46.21 41.91 37.87 36.00 35.78 32.52 30.42

Links between thematic LRDs (e.g., Factors 4 and 8, ‘Officialization of Montenegrin 1 & 2’) are highlighted, where appropriate. Factor 2: ‘Endangerment and Protection of the Cyrillic script’. This language-related discourse included the following salient collocates: script, Cyrillic (adj./n.), use (n.), official, Latin, constitution, protection, association and law. The top-scoring texts for Factor 2 are listed in Table 4.6. The principal area of interdiscursive overlap (i.e., several individual texts scoring highly on both factors) was with Factor 5 (‘Minority language rights’), but because texts representative of Factor 5 discuss non-CSS ethnolinguistic identities, the thematic discourse represented by Factor 5 is not directly relevant here and will not be considered further. Based on the salient collocates and a qualitative examination of representative texts, Factor 2 was interpreted as a classic discourse of endangerment (cf. Duchêne & Heller, 2007), here referring to a (perceived) threat to the Cyrillic script from the widespread use of the Latin script in Serbia. Text sample 1 (from POL-11-2-2005-108, ranked 1 in Table 4.6, C., 2015) illustrates the discourse typically found in articles scoring highly on Factor 2 (the collocates comprising this factor are in bold). Text sample 1 The association for the protection of the Serbian script “Serbian Cyrillic” demands that the President of Serbia apologize to the Serbian people because a constitution draft submitted by an expert group he formed treats both Latin and Cyrillic as Serbian scripts. In their statement yesterday, members of the association asked if the authors of this draft knew of any other people in the world who use a foreign script in

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their language. […] Above all, the statement further reads, the authors of this constitution draft do not know that the Latin script had not been used in the Serbian language before a time during which the good will to help the Southern Slavic co-tribesmen Croats to finally get their own script was abused.

It should be noted here that both Latin and Cyrillic scripts are in widespread use in Serbia (for a discussion of the significance of this issue, see Chapter 6). Although the two scripts are equally functional, the Cyrillic is autochthonous and thus closely linked to the Serbian ethnonational identity. This has made the use of the Latin script a target for Serbian ultranationalists who argue that it represents a threat to (i.e., endangers) Serbian Cyrillic and thus to the Serbs themselves. Texts scoring highly on Factor 2 thus typically discuss a (perceived) threat to the Cyrillic script in the context of available legal protections, sometimes making references to minority language rights and regional ethnolinguistic identities. More importantly, texts representative of this discourse often thematize Central South Slavic ethnolinguistic identities as the Latin script is sometimes indexically linked to the Croats, as in the excerpt from the Politika article from February 11, 2005 above. Factor 11: ‘Officialization of Bosnian’. This language-related discourse included the following salient collocates: Bosnian, Bosniak, elective, element, national and board. The top-scoring texts for Factor 11 are listed in Table 4.7. As can be seen from cluster analysis (see Table 4.13 below), the principal area of thematic overlap was with Factors 1, 3, and 9 since Bosnian is often discussed as a minority language within the Table 4.7 Top 10 highest scoring articles for Factor 11

Rank

Article

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

POL-15-12-2004-99.txt POL-15-1-2005-107.txt POL-12-11-2004-113.txt POL-13-11-2004-108.txt POL-10-1-2005-134.txt POL-11-11-2004-127.txt POL-26-10-2004-29.txt POL-16-2-2005-82.txt POL-12-3-2003-119.txt POL-10-12-2004-127.txt

Factor score 39.91 37.19 33.23 30.79 29.08 28.13 26.68 25.26 19.45 18.95

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education domain in Serbia as well as one of the contested Central South Slavic varieties. However, as mentioned above, Factors 1, 3, and 9 were judged to be only marginally relevant for our present purposes, so they are excluded from discussion here. Based on the salient collocates and a qualitative examination of representative texts, Factor 11 was interpreted as a (thematic, small ‘d’) discourse on the officialization of Bosnian. Text sample 2 (from POL-1211-2004-113, ranked 3 in Table 4.7, Brki´c, 2004) provides an illustration of the discourse typically found in articles scoring highly on Factor 11. Text sample 2 WHY BOSNIAKS IN SERBIA CANNOT STUDY BOSNIAN. The Bosnian language may be introduced [as a subject] in our schools starting next school year if that language is recognized by linguists. During the meeting of the Pedagogical board of the Serbian parliament a witty remark was made that something which doesn’t exist, the Bosnian language, had been discussed for an hour. The Minister of Education, dr. Slobodan Vuksanovi´c, repeated several times that the Bosnian language does not officially exist for now, but the member of parliament Milan Veselinovi´c from Novi Pazar (SRS [Serbian Radical Party]) said that first- and secondgrade students in some elementary schools in the Novi Pazar, Tutin, and Sjenica municipalities were already studying Bosnian from a textbook for the Bosnian language with elements of national culture.

As can be seen, language is conceptualized in terms of collective identity and culture (“Bosnian language with elements of national culture”). Texts scoring highly on Factor 11, such as this Politika article from November 12, 2004, typically discuss the then topical introduction (and thus recognition/officialization) of Bosnian as a minority language in schools in Sanjak (southwest Serbia), a historically Bosniak-majority area. Note, again, the explicit link between minority language rights and ethnocultural rights which here points to the legal requirements issuing from Serbia’s membership of the Council of Europe and possibly also its accession negotiations with the EU, both of which require provisions for minority rights. Texts representative of this discourse also typically thematize Central South Slavic ethnolinguistic identities and show traces of the discourse of contestation related to these identities as Bosniak minority rights are recognized only formally and in order to meet the abovementioned requirements (more on this in Chapter 5).

4

Table 4.8 Top 10 highest scoring articles for Factor 4

QUANTITATIVE RESULTS BY METHOD

Rank

Article

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

BLI-30-3-2004-544.txt POL-15-4-2004-89.txt POL-12-7-2004-89.txt POL-5-4-2004-141.txt POL-16-4-2004-86.txt POL-13-12-2006-119.txt POL-2-4-2004-166.txt POL-8-9-2004-157.txt NIN-18-12-2003-10.txt POL-1-9-2003-173.txt

79

Factor score 50.56 36.23 32.47 30.70 30.14 29.96 26.72 26.67 26.10 24.72

Factor 4: ‘Officialization of Montenegrin 1’. This language-related discourse included the following salient collocates: school (university), (university) students, professor, philosophy, department, Nikši´c, philology, decision and renaming. The top-scoring texts for Factor 4 are listed in Table 4.8. The principal area of overlap was with Factor 8 (‘Officialization of Montenegrin 2’). Based on the salient collocates and a qualitative examination of representative texts, Factor 4 was interpreted as one of the two discourses on the officialization of Montenegrin, a process which was carried out in two distinct phases with Serbian first being renamed into ‘mother tongue’ and then into Montenegrin. Text sample 3 (from BLI-30-3-2004-544, ranked 1 in Table 4.8, BETA, 2004) illustrates the discourse typically found in articles scoring highly on Factor 4. Text sample 3 Demanding that the Montenegrin minister of education withdraw his decision about the renaming of the Serbian language into mother tongue in elementary schools and high schools, the students from the Department of Serbian language and literature at the School of Philosophy at Nikši´c suspended yesterday afternoon their hunger strike, which they had begun that morning. “The professors support our demand, so we will wait for the outcome of the meeting of the Council for general education of Montenegro, which is scheduled for Friday. However, if our demand for the reinstatement of the name of the Serbian language is not accepted, we will resume our hunger strike beginning on Monday,” Bojan Strunjaš, the president of the student strike board, told BETA agency. The students from the Department of Serbian language and literature also organized

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the signing of a petition for the defense of the Serbian language which had been signed by about 1,000 students of the School of Philosophy by 3 PM.

As this excerpt from a Blic article from March 30, 2003 shows, texts scoring highly on Factor 4 typically report on the protests against the new language policy by professors and students of Serbian in Montenegro. It should be noted that, although Serbs (who were and continue to be vehemently against this policy) represent a sizeable minority in Montenegro with a strong political representation in the Montenegrin parliament, they were unable to stop its implementation because ethnic Montenegrins and their political parties received support from other minority groups (Bosniaks, Albanians, etc.). Texts representative of this discourse are directly relevant to Central South Slavic ethnolinguistic identities and are linked to texts representative of the discourse identified by Factor 8. Factor 8: ‘Officialization of Montenegrin 2’. This languagerelated discourse included the following salient collocates: Montenegrin, Montenegro, renaming, Nikši´c, Montenegrins , mother (adj.), authorities and introduction. The top-scoring texts for Factor 8 are listed in Table 4.9. Based on the salient collocates and a qualitative examination of representative texts, Factor 8 was interpreted as a second discourse on the officialization of Montenegrin. However, in contrast to the first discourse on the officialization of Montenegrin, which was predominantly focused on the protests by students and professors of Serbian in Montenegro against the new language policy, this discourse also comprised the more general Table 4.9 Top 10 highest scoring articles for Factor 8

Rank

Article

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

POL-26-7-2005-39.txt VRE-17-7-2003-115.txt POL-9-11-2004-137.txt BLI-30-3-2004-544.txt POL-29-3-2004-25.txt BLI-9-10-2004-161.txt POL-31-3-2004-2.txt BLI-20-9-2004-204.txt POL-11-4-2003-113.txt POL-11-4-2003-111.txt

Factor score 39.05 27.85 24.49 24.00 22.69 22.53 22.24 22.17 21.85 21.85

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views opposing the policy, particularly those espoused by nationalist intellectuals. Text sample 4 (VRE-17-7-2003-115, ranked 2 in Table 4.9, N., 2003) provides an illustration of the discourse representative of articles scoring highly on Factor 8. Text sample 4 Matija Be´ckovi´c, “the defender of Serbhood in Montenegro on duty,” reacted quickly, in his well-known style, to Dr. Vukoti´c’s idea about the introduction of English as an official language in Montenegro: “It would be very useful to introduce English as a second official language in Montenegro because the Montenegrin language would get some welldeserved rest… If ‘mother tongue’ is introduced in place of the Serbian language and Serbian script, then it would perhaps be more just to call it ‘step-mother tongue’.”

Texts scoring highly on Factor 8, such as this Vreme article from July 17, 2003, typically discuss the fallout over the officialization of Montenegrin in Montenegro as well as its links to the then impending declaration of independence of Montenegro. In this example, Be´ckovi´c, a Serbian writer and member of the SANU Department for language and literature, ironizes a proposal by the Montenegrin economist Veselin Vukoti´c to declare English a second official language in Montenegro by employing a stereotype of Montenegrins as lazy (“Montenegrin language would get some well-deserved rest”). Following this, and typically for Serbian objections to the change in language policy in Montenegro at the time, Be´ckovi´c also denounces the change to the official name of the language in Montenegro from Serbian into ‘mother tongue’ by proposing, tongue in cheek, that it be called ‘step-mother tongue’ instead. It should be noted that both proposals were (rightly) seen by Serbs in general and Serbian nationalists in both Montenegro and Serbia in particular as a precursor to Montenegro’s later political independence. As can be seen, texts representative of this discourse thematize ethnolinguistic identity and are directly relevant to a discussion of links between language and ethnonationalism in West Central Balkans. Factor 10: ‘SANU (Pseudo)Linguistics’. This language-related discourse included the following salient collocates: linguistic, linguist, SANU ( Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts), dictionary, linguistics, scientific, Serbian, science, word, standard, Serbo-Croatian, edition and expression. The top-scoring texts for Factor 10 are listed in Table 4.10.

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Table 4.10 Top 10 highest scoring articles for Factor 10

Rank

Article

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

POL-9-2-2005-121.txt POL-17-6-2006-95.txt POL-1-10-2005-165.txt POL-9-4-2005-127.txt POL-5-1-2008-166.txt POL-20-8-2003-80.txt POL-25-10-2003-33.txt POL-12-5-2008-144.txt BLI-10-2-2005-552.txt POL-14-9-2006-130.txt

Factor score 35.57 34.38 30.87 30.23 27.77 27.68 27.36 27.15 27.09 26.90

The principal area of overlap was with Factor 6 (‘Contestation over common language [CSS] ownership and name’). Based on the salient collocates and a qualitative examination of representative texts, Factor 10 was interpreted as a complex, technical, (pseudo)scientific discourse on linguistics generally, and language policy more specifically, purveyed by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU). Text sample 5 (from POL-17-6-2006-95, ranked 2 in Table 4.10, Fekete, 2006) provides an illustration of the discourse typically found in articles scoring highly on Factor 10. Text sample 5 Freed from an earlier obligation to sustain linguistic unity, Serbian linguistics [now] faces important tasks. The linguistic discussions (initiated by academician Dragoslav Mihailovi´c’s lecture) in which both the expert and lay publics are again engaged these days are not really new. They go back to Vuk’s time, but have extended to our days. However, the gist of the “problem” is whether the language spoken by Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Bosnians, Montenegrins is one but not unified, or unified but unequal and different. Here, two criteria are usually considered: the scientific (linguistic) one and the national (socio-emotional) one. In this framework, there are usually two views: (1) the speakers of the given linguistic (national) entities have (i.e., must have) their own autochthonous language and (2) language (along with a script and a religious affiliation) is a basic symbol of national legitimacy and a people’s identity. Beginning with the national principle, the contestation mainly revolves around the naming of the language, while the main arguments are lexical differences. […] Therefore, there is no (nor has there ever been) credible scientific authority

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which could prove that Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian/Bosniak, Montenegrin or other varieties are separate, autochthonous languages. In fact, they are varieties (variants) of the same linguistic system and thus models of the same language. A single linguistic system. The more recent critical thought (especially today) does not ponder the differences within the linguistic system, but rather the naming of the language, whereby the label “Serbo-Croatian” is especially criticized.

Texts scoring highly on Factor 10, such as this Politika article from June 17, 2006, are typically longer and more complex than average newspaper texts in this corpus. The top scoring texts here are characterized by a combination of references to the lexicographic and other language standardization work by SANU as well as (pseudo)linguistic arguments employed to contest the authenticity of non-Serbian Central South Slavic glottonyms and thus their associated ethnolinguistic identities. Texts representative of this discourse often thematize Central South Slavic ethnolinguistic identities overtly, and so are directly relevant to the central research questions in this book. Factor 6: ‘Contestation over Language (CSS) Ownership and Name’. The thematic language-related discourse indexed by Factor 6, finally, included the following salient collocates: Croatia, Croats , Croatian, Serbs , academy, name, Serbian, Serbo-Croatian, war and call. The top-scoring texts for Factor 6 are listed in Table 4.11. Table 4.11 Top 10 highest scoring articles for Factor 6

Rank

Article

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

POL-24-9-2005-45.txt POL-20-8-2003-80.txt POL-20-1-2006-76.txt POL-1-10-2003-185.txt POL-3-7-2006-192.txt POL-10-7-2006-142.txt POL-22-7-2006-55.txt POL-11-3-2005-141.txt POL-10-9-2005-127.txt POL-25-4-2005-36.txt

Factor score 50.58 30.11 28.09 28.07 28.01 26.19 25.75 25.75 24.46 21.04

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Based on the salient collocates and a qualitative examination of representative texts, Factor 6 was interpreted as a discourse of contestation over common language (CSS) ownership and name. The existence and prominence of this discourse were noted at several points above. Note that although the contestation here is mainly between Serbs and Croats, also Bosnians and Montenegrins are featured prominently in most relevant texts. Similarly, although this contestation can be multilateral, it is mostly directed at non-Serb Central South Slavic ethnolinguistic identities. Text sample 6 (from POL-11-3-2005-141, ranked 8 in Table 4.11, Radisavljevi´c, 2005) illustrates the discourse characteristic of articles scoring highly on Factor 6 (the collocates comprising this factor in this sample are in bold underline).3 Text sample 6 Q: What is Serbian today and who speaks it? A: That is not an easy question to provide an answer for with which everyone would agree. Therefore, the answer can be purely scientific, but also unscientific, that is to say one from the domain of daily politics. Also, the answer can be given from the perspective of linguistics as a science, or from the perspective of those disciplines which belong, as Germans would say, to ‘soft’ linguistics such as sociolinguistics, for example. […] Vuk [Karadži´c] used to say that it is the literary language of all Serbs because it is spoken by Serbs of all three faiths: “ Orthodox”, “ Roman Catholic” and “ Mohammedan”. As these faiths have been turned since Vuk’s time into political nations , including Montenegrins as a separate nation within the “ Serbs of the Orthodox faith”, one could say that Serbian continues to be spoken by all of Vuk’s Serbs, but the difference is that not all of them call themselves Serbs. Beside those who still do call themselves Serbs, the literary language is spoken (and written) by Croats, and Muslims (who now call themselves Bosniaks ), and Montenegrins. […] ˇ But Croats did not transform their autochthonous Cakavian into a literary standard. Instead, because of broader national interests, primarily a Croatization of Catholic Serbs and thus annexation of their territories to Croatia, they took for their literary language Vuk’s Serbian ˇ Neo-Štokavian literary language. Thus, they left their Cakavian at the level of dialect and have tried in all kinds of ways for a century and a half to deny the Serbianness of Serbian, first by cramming into the language label their name so that Serbian became the only binominal language in the world, and then in the next phase they removed the Serbian name from the compound label [i.e., Serbo-Croatian], turning it nominally into pure Croatian.

Texts scoring highly on Factor 6, such as this Politika article from March 11, 2005 (an interview with the Serbian linguist Miloš Kovaˇcevi´c,

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entitled “The speech of Vuk’s Serbs”), typically discuss language- and identity-related contestation between the different Central South Slavic communities which has been going on since the nineteenth century but which, for obvious reasons, has been particularly intense since the breakup of Yugoslavia. As can be seen from the notation in Note 3, also in evidence are the two main (ideological, big ‘D’) language-related discourses identified in this data set (endangerment and contestation), as well as the pseudoscientific argumentation4 that typically undergirds them (all three are discussed in more detail in Chapters 5 and 6). Evidently, then, texts representative of this discourse are directly and inextricably discursively linked to texts representative of Factor 105 and thematize ethnolinguistic identity in a most pertinent way. In sum, exploratory factor analysis identified twelve factors which suggest twelve thematic language-related discourses exhibiting obvious mutual links, i.e., interdiscursivity (e.g., ‘Officialization of Montenegrin’). Further, although most factors/language-related discourses identified here do feature references to Central South Slavic identities, six of the twelve discourses noted above are clearly the more pertinent for an analysis of links between language-related discourses and language ideologies and ethnonationalism. The synchronic, diachronic, and agent variation in the central six language-related discourses (Factors 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 11), and their mutual interdiscursive links were further explored using analysis of variance and cluster analysis. For economy of presentation, we focus on Factor 6 as the common denominator of all the pertinent factors and the most overt manifestation of the ideological discourse of contestation, as well as perhaps the only factor here which indexes a big ‘D’ ideological discourse directly rather than indirectly via a small ‘d’ thematic discourse.

4.4

Analysis of Variance

Synchronic variation. To examine synchronic variation, texts were grouped by publication (Blic, NIN, Politika, and Vreme) and mean scores on individual factors were compared (see Ajši´c, 2015, pp. 59– 61, 132–140). Descriptive statistics for Factor 6 and publication are presented in Table 4.12. To evaluate the hypothesis that the Factor 6 LRD (‘Contestation over common language [CSS] ownership and name’) was purveyed unevenly by the different publications, the Kruskal-Wallis test was conducted, indicating a statistically significant difference (3, N = 943) = 21.471, p = .000. Pairwise comparisons showed that texts in NIN and Politika scored significantly higher on this LRD than did texts in Blic,

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Table 4.12 Descriptive statistics for Factor 6 scores (synchronic variation) Factor

Mean & SD Blic

6

NIN

−0.201

0.438

0.034

Politika 0.606

0.049

Vreme 1.046

−0.180

0.449

while also texts in NIN scored significantly higher on this discourse than did texts in Vreme. Put simply, although traces of this particular LRD could be found in texts in all four publications, texts published in the older and more conservative outlets, NIN (est. in 1935) and Politika (est. in 1904), were significantly more likely to exhibit traces of this LRD than texts published in the comparatively more recently established and more liberal outlets, Blic (est. in 1996) and Vreme (est. in 1990). In other words, the older, more conservative outlets Politika and NIN offer better representations of dominant LRDs in Serbia, whereas the more recently established and more liberal outlets Blic and Vreme show signs of a somewhat different discursive and, by extension, ideological orientation. Diachronic variation. To examine diachronic variation, texts were grouped by year of publication (2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2008) and mean scores on individual factors were compared. Descriptive statistics for Factor 6 and year of publication are presented in Table 4.13. To evaluate the hypothesis that this contestation discourse was purveyed unevenly during the given timeframe, the Kruskal-Wallis test was conducted, indicating no statistically significant difference (4, N = 943) = 2.939, p = .568, which suggests that this discourse was stable throughout this period. Agent variation. Finally, to examine agent variation (variation between texts generally authored by professionals and members of the public), texts were grouped by type of article (general newspaper articles vs. letters-to-the-editor)6 and mean scores on individual factors were compared. Descriptive statistics for Factor 6 and type of article are shown Table 4.13 Descriptive statistics for Factor 6 scores (diachronic variation) Factor

Mean & SD 2003

6

−0.11

2004 0.52

−0.04

2005 0.67

0.23

2006 1.41

0.07

2008 1.06

−0.10

0.63

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Table 4.14 Descriptive statistics for Factor 6 scores (agent variation) Factor

Mean & SD Newspaper articles

6

−0.02

Letters-to-the-editor 0.88

0.25

1.04

in Table 4.14. To evaluate the hypothesis that the contestation discourse was purveyed unevenly between general newspaper articles and lettersto-the-editor, the Mann-Whitney U test was conducted, indicating a statistically significant difference, U = 22.885, p = .013. This result indicates that the discourse pertaining to ethnolinguistic contestation was more likely to be found in letters-to-the-editor, which suggests that authors of letters-to-the-editor (the public and activists alike) may have been more zealous as agents of contestation than professional journalists and other contributors.7

4.5

Cluster Analysis

CA is a multivariate exploratory statistical procedure used to group, within a data set, cases/observations (e.g., texts) classified with respect to categorical variables. Clustering texts and factors into groups based on similarity in scores on quantitative measures offers an insight into discursive patterning independent of researcher inference. Put differently, while the thematic and discursive links between some of the factors seem obvious logically (e.g., ‘Officialization of Montengrin 1 & 2’), cluster analysis can show that they are undergirded by a quantitative, empirical reality. CA was conducted using all twelve factors and the agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) method (see Staples & Biber, 2015). After a range of cluster solutions was examined, a six-cluster solution was identified as optimal. Table 4.15 shows the basic descriptive statistics for all twelve factors as predictor variables in a six-cluster solution. Mean scores of each of the twelve factors for each of the six identified clusters (interrelated sets of thematic discourses) were examined to determine which factors scored most highly on which clusters. A one-way ANOVA was used to compare the mean scores of the predictor variables (i.e., factors) and check for statistical significance (Table 4.16). Finally, the composition of each cluster was investigated using the crosstabs function

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Table 4.15 Basic descriptive statistics for all twelve factors in a six-cluster solution Factor/Cluster F1

F2

F3

F4

F5

1 2 3 4 5 6 Total 1 2 3 4 5 6 Total 1 2 3 4 5 6 Total 1 2 3 4 5 6 Total 1 2 3 4 5 6 Total

N

Mean

SD

775 72 134 159 78 39 1257 775 72 134 159 78 39 1257 775 72 134 159 78 39 1257 775 72 134 159 78 39 1257 775 72 134 159 78 39 1257

−2.0691 −3.2274 18.7734 −3.3504 −.3074 −3.1540 .0000 −.5533 −.9219 −1.6581 −1.6931 −.2607 25.8176 .0000 −.7485 −.8432 6.5618 −1.1899 −.0936 −1.0775 .0000 −.8464 −.3007 .7560 −1.0648 10.1722 −1.2256 .0000 .3354 −.3526 −.5388 −1.0269 −.6604 1.3449 .0000

3.41779 2.11004 10.77776 1.55064 3.96494 2.23610 7.98397 3.63599 2.42671 1.38071 1.46543 2.79064 10.02103 5.83630 1.84445 1.67400 8.48330 .51443 2.46480 .81042 3.93664 2.34708 2.79879 5.01901 2.10815 11.15590 1.59152 4.67919 5.46140 2.49785 2.44067 2.45412 1.85520 4.27696 4.60547

(continued)

4

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Table 4.15 (continued) Factor/Cluster F6

F7

F8

F9

F10

1 2 3 4 5 6 Total 1 2 3 4 5 6 Total 1 2 3 4 5 6 Total 1 2 3 4 5 6 Total 1 2 3 4 5 6 Total

N

Mean

SD

775 72 134 159 78 39 1257 775 72 134 159 78 39 1257 775 72 134 159 78 39 1257 775 72 134 159 78 39 1257 775 72 134 159 78 39 1257

−.2630 8.6821 −2.2035 −1.2229 .1517 1.4513 .0000 −1.7200 1.2139 −2.8041 11.3777 −1.0456 −2.7216 .0000 −.7218 −1.1108 −.2289 −1.6072 11.5404 .6529 .0000 −.6976 −.1311 6.8956 −1.5884 −.4929 −2.1271 .0000 −.9072 14.9900 −2.7043 −.5382 .8504 .1380 .0000

3.29035 12.20590 .99503 1.46333 2.98166 3.97872 4.65077 2.38766 4.61241 1.57486 5.60051 3.20802 3.23525 5.41351 2.35914 1.81867 2.00141 1.28089 9.81900 4.92769 4.46109 2.76180 2.70570 9.77446 1.21759 2.47942 1.47721 4.65937 3.50589 8.98762 1.63691 3.21347 4.05708 3.73877 5.42277

(continued)

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Table 4.15 (continued) Factor/Cluster F11

F12

1 2 3 4 5 6 Total 1 2 3 4 5 6 Total

Table 4.16 Results of ANOVA for twelve factors in a six-cluster solution

F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 F6 F7 F8 F9 F10 F11 F12

N

Mean

SD

775 72 134 159 78 39 1257 775 72 134 159 78 39 1257

−.1661 .0630 1.7206 −.6243 .0578 −.2975 .0000 .0491 .1018 −.5944 .1818 .5309 −.9244 .0000

2.48777 1.70718 7.44665 1.11762 1.64304 1.29823 3.25725 3.88165 2.56701 2.43468 2.69452 4.56334 1.97424 3.56106

df

F

Sig.

5

503.230 433.370 126.204 120.681 3.884 77.948 492.572 206.930 92.270 235.270 9.431 1.748

.000 .000 .000 .000 .002 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .121

in SPSS and the three independent variables (publication, year of publication, general newspaper articles vs. letters-to-the-editor) to examine synchronic, diachronic, and agent variation in thematic discourses (see Tables 4.18, 4.19, and 4.20 further below). The mean factor scores were markedly different for each of the six clusters (Table 4.15), with a statistically significant difference between the mean factor scores for all factors, except Factor 12 (Table 4.16). None of

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Table 4.17 Cluster composition in a six-cluster solution Cluster

Cluster label

1 2

Other (no factors) Contestation over common language (CSS) ownership & name Language education (incl. Officialization of Bosnian) Literature & publishing Officialization of Montenegrin Protection of the Cyrillic script & Minority language rights

3 4 5 6

Factors

F6, F10 F1, F3, F9, F11 F7 F4, F8, F12* F2, F5

*p = .121

the factors had a high mean score for Cluster 1 (which subsumes most of the variance in the data, 65.87%, unaccounted for by this factor solution),8 while the highest Factor 12 mean score was for Cluster 5 but without a statistical significance. Table 4.17 shows how the remaining factors clustered. As mentioned above, texts scoring highly on Factors 6 and 10 (‘Contestation over common language (CSS) ownership and name’; ‘SANU [pseudo]linguistics’) share lexis related to CSS ethnolinguistic identities and thus are grouped in Cluster 2. Texts loading on Factors 1, 3, 9 and 11 (‘Language education administration’; ‘School entrance exams’; ‘Foreign language education’; ‘Officialization of Bosnian’) all share lexis related to (language) education and are grouped in Cluster 3. Here, three generally ethnolinguistically-neutral language education-related factors (Factors 1, 3, and 9) are joined by the ethnolinguistically-specific Factor 11 because the officialization of Bosnian is discussed primarily in the context of language education. Factor 7 (‘Literature and publishing’), with the highest mean score for Cluster 4, did not cluster with any other factors. This was expected as texts loading on this factor were typically thematically unrelated to texts loading on other factors. Factors 4 and 8 (‘Officialization of Montenegrin 1/2’), grouped in Cluster 5, make a logical set since both deal with the same issue, albeit with slightly different foci. Finally, Factors 2 and 5 (‘Endangerment and protection of the Cyrillic script’, ‘Minority language rights’) are grouped in Cluster 6 on account of a tendency in the discourse on the endangerment of the Cyrillic script to include references to minority rights.

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The results of CA shown above suggest two conclusions. First, lexical covariance can extend beyond the individual factors and suggest the existence of discursive links between factors/thematic discourses. The most obvious example of this is the discourse on the officialization of Montenegrin (Cluster 5), but other discursive links between factors can be inferred from the other clusters as well (e.g., language education discourse in Factors 1, 3, 9, and 11). Second, despite its obvious usefulness, lexical covariance alone is not sufficient to identify ideological discourses and ideologies. This can be seen in the way Factors 4, 6, 8, 10, and 11, all of which bear traces of an ideological discourse of contestation, are grouped in separate clusters. Although each of these factors points to an aspect of the discourse of contestation suggested by previous analyses and thus confirms its existence and extent, quantitative correlational analysis is in effect thematic discourse analysis and is typically unable to capture the underlying ideological links and thus any ideological discourses. This must be done through interpretive qualitative analysis. Finally, examination of synchronic, diachronic, and agent variation in cluster composition using crosstabulation did not yield any obvious patterns of interest in terms of cluster membership (Tables 4.18, 4.19, and 4.20), with three possible exceptions. The first is the domination of articles from the two dailies, and especially Politika, in this sample (see Table 4.18), which is unsurprising given that together they account for Table 4.18 Cluster membership (synchronic variation) Cluster

1 2 3 4 5 6

Total

Cluster label

Other (no factors) Subtotal Contestation over common language (CSS) ownership & name Language education (incl. Officialization of Bosnian) Literature & publishing Officialization of Montenegrin Protection of the Cyrillic script & Minority language rights Subtotal

Publication

Total

Blic

NIN

Politika

Vreme

104

147

477

47

3

5

63

1

775 775 72

35

3

89

7

134

8 10 4

22 7 0

123 60 35

6 1 0

159 78 39

60 164

37 184

370 847

15 62

482 1257

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Table 4.19 Cluster membership (diachronic variation) Cluster

1 2 3 4 5 6

Cluster label

Year

Other (no factors) Subtotal Contestation over common language (CSS) ownership & name Language education (incl. Officialization of Bosnian) Literature & publishing Officialization of Montenegrin Protection of the Cyrillic script & Minority language rights Subtotal

Total

Total

2003

2004

2005

2006

2008

173

157

145

158

142

12

5

24

20

11

775 775 72

49

42

20

9

14

134

36 21 6

28 34 7

33 7 10

31 6 11

31 10 5

159 78 39

124 297

116 273

94 239

77 235

71 213

482 1257

Table 4.20 Cluster membership (agent variation) Cluster

1 2

3 4 5 6

Total

Cluster label

Other (no factors) Subtotal Contestation over common language (CSS) ownership & name Language education (incl. Officialization of Bosnian) Literature & publishing Officialization of Montenegrin Protection of the Cyrillic script & Minority language rights Subtotal

Type of article

Total

Newspaper articles

Letters-to-the-editor

685

90

63

9

775 775 72

125

9

134

156 76

3 2

159 78

23

16

39

443 1128

39 129

482 1257

over 80% of all texts in both the research and comparator corpora (see Tables 3.1 and 3.2). The second is the steady decrease in the number of relevant articles per year, from a total of 124 in 2003 to 71 in 2008,

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´ A. AJŠIC 350 297 300

273 239

No. of articles

250

235 213

200

150

124

116 94

100

77

71

2006

2008

50

0 2003

2004

2005

Year of publication No. of all 5+ hits articles

No. of 5+ hits articles in Clusters 2-6

Fig. 4.2 Diachronic distribution of 5+ Hit Articles (by year, all publications)

which is reflected in the steady annual decrease in the total number of articles overtly thematizing language during this period and may indicate issue fatigue (see Table 4.19 and Fig. 4.2). The third is the disproportionately high interest in the ostensible endangerment and protection of the Cyrillic script (and minority language rights) in the letters-to-the-editor (16 of 39 letters-to-the-editor as opposed to 23 of 443 newspaper articles; see Table 4.20). Given the lack of other clear-cut patterns, it seems fair to conclude that, despite the variation observed above (synchronic, diachronic, and agent), there is a certain degree of similarity between the discursive profiles of the different publications and the general newspaper articles and letters-to-the-editor, as well as relative stability in thematic discourses over time. This is lent further credence by a certain degree of both synchronic and diachronic dispersion of ideological LRDs (endangerment and contestation) identified through qualitative analysis (see further below), although there is the caveat concerning the overrepresentation of dailies and Politika in particular (see also Note 3 in Chapter 5).

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Notes 1. VukStefanovi´c Karadži´c (1787–1864) was a Serbian language and literary scholar who created the orthographic system in use in contemporary Serbian and other CSS varieties and published several early Serbian dictionaries and editions of Southern Slavic folk literature (see Encyclopædia Britannica). Karadži´c also authored the pamphlet Srbi svi i svuda [Serbs all and everywhere] (1836 [1849]), which is widely considered to be the founding document of the linguacultural ideology of Serbian nationalism. He remains one of the most revered figures of Serbian history. The parallel with Johann Gottfried Herder is striking despite contemporary disagreements over the meaning of Herder’s work (see, e.g., Piller, 2016). 2. ‘Srpska akademija nauka i umjetnosti’ (Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts). 3. Italics = discourse of contestation; underline = pseudoscientific argumentation; bold = discourse of endangerment. 4. Although what I am calling pseudoscientific argumentation here can itself be classified as a type of discourse, I have chosen not to apply that label in order to preserve the distinction between this pseudoscientific argumentation and the specific ideological discourses (endangerment, contestation) identified in this study. 5. Indeed, individual texts often scored highly on two factors, i.e., they were representative of two thematic ‘d’ discourses but also of an underlying ideological ‘D’ discourse, e.g., POL-20-8-2003-80 ranked sixth among the top-scoring texts for Factor 10 (Table 4.9) and second among the top-scoring texts for Factor 6 (Table 4.10). This finding corroborates other quantitative evidence of interdiscursive links between different factors/thematic ‘d’ discourses identified here. 6. Newspaper articles and letters-to-the-editor are not homogeneous categories but can be considered approximations of attitudes characteristic of discursive and practical consciousness (Giddens, 1979). 7. Obviously, selections of articles, including letters-to-the-editor, are also reflective of a publication’s agenda. 8. Although, in social sciences and applied linguistics, the minimum requirement for the cumulative percentage of variance explained is often set at 55–60% of total variance (see, e.g., Loewen & Gonulal, 2015), that threshold does not apply to the construct of thematic discourses in topically heterogeneous data sets as here. Put simply, the large portion of the variance is unaccounted for not because the chosen factor solution is flawed but rather because the topical heterogeneity in this type of data set makes it unlikely for any parsimonious and interpretable factor solutions to explain a large portion of total variance.

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References Primary References BETA. (2004, March 30). Štrajk glad-u zbog jezika zamrznut do ponedeljka [Hunger strike over language on hold until Monday]. Blic. http:// www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/blic/2004/3/30/C6986EF415C483F 1C1256E660071D489/strajk-gladju-zbog-jezika-zamrznut-do-ponede ljka [BLI-30-3-2004-544]. Brki´c, A. (2004, November 12). Jezik kojeg nema [The language that isn’t]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2004/11/12/ C1256ED9003F1BEFC1256F49007F417B/jezik-koga-nema [POL-12-112004-113]. C., A. (2005, February 11). Latinica nije srpsko pismo [Latin is not a Serbian script]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2005/2/ 11/C1256F7A005A8C61C1256FA40083C3C4/latinica-nije-srpsko-pismo [POL-11-2-2005-108]. Fekete, E. (2006, June 17). Samobitnost srpskog nacionalnog jezika [The identity of the Serbian national language]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/ novinska-clanak/politika/2006/6/17/C12570D700350FEDC1257193002 6A546/samobitnost-srpskog-nacionalnog-jezika [POL-17-6-2006-95]. N., N. (2003, July 17). Matija Be´ckovi´c. Vreme. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinskaclanak/vreme/2003/7/17/D8104886808EFD67C1256D67003B5D84/ matija-beckovic [VRE-17-7-2003-115]. Radisavljevi´c, Z. (2005, March 11). Govor Vukovih Srba [The speech of Vuk’s Serbs]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2005/3/11/ C1256F7A005A8C61C1256FC100320E85/govor-vukovih-srba [POL-11-32005-141].

Secondary References Ajši´c, A. (2015). Language ideologies, public discourses, and ethnonationalism in the Balkans: a corpus-based study (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ. Baker, P. (2006). Using corpora in discourse analysis. Continuum. Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., KhosraviNik, M., Krzyzanowski, M., McEnery, T., & Wodak, R. (2014). A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in UK press. Discourse & Society, 19(3), 273–306. Baker, P., & Levon, E. (1979). Picking the right cherries? A comparison of corpus-based and qualitative analyses of news articles about masculinity. Discourse and Communication, 9(2), 221–236. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1750481314568542.

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Biber, D. (1988). Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge University Press. Duchêne, A., & Heller, M. (2007). Discourses of endangerment: Ideology and interest in the defence of languages. Continuum. Encyclopædia Britannica. (2020, November 2). Vuk Stefanovi´c Karadži´c. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vuk-Stefanovic-Karadzic. Fitzsimmons Doolan, S. (2011). Identifying and describing language ideologies related to Arizona educational language policy (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Fitzsimmons Doolan, S. (2015). Using lexical variables to identify language ideologies in a policy corpus. Corpora, 9(1), 57–82. Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in social theory: Action, structure and contradiction in social analysis. University of California Press. Hunston, S. (2002). Corpora in applied linguistics. Cambridge University Press. Loewen, S., & Gonulal, T. (2015). Exploratory factor analysis and principal components analysis. In Plonsky, L. (Ed.), Advancing quantitative methods in second language research (pp. 182–212). Routledge. Piller, I. (2016). Herder: An explainer for linguists. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/herder-an-explainer-for-linguists/. Scott, M. (2004). PC analysis of key words—And key key words. System, 25(2), 233–245. Staples, S., & Biber, D. (2015). Cluster analysis. In L. Plonsky (Ed.), Advancing quantitative methods in second language research (pp. 243–274). Routledge. Subtirelu, N. C. (2015). ‘She does have an accent but…’: Race and language ideology in students’ evaluations of mathematics instructors on RateMyProfessors.com. Language in Society, 44(1), 35–62. Vessey, R. (2003). Too much French? Not enough French? The Vancouver Olympics and a very Canadian language ideological debate. Multilingua, 32(5), 659–682. Williams, R. (1976). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Qualitative Results by Method

Abstract This chapter presents the results of the qualitative portion of the analysis. Also here, the discussion is organized by method, including basic content and thematic analysis and an application of elements of the discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis. The content and thematic analysis section includes salient text excerpts organized by factor (i.e., the results of quantitative analysis laid out in Chapter 4). The discourse-historical approach section identifies the prominent topoi in this data set and provides representative and illustrative text excerpts. Keywords Content analysis · Thematic analysis · Discourse-historical approach · Ideological discourse · Topoi

This section presents the results of a qualitative analysis of representative texts. As noted above, qualitative analysis was based on and informed by the results of quantitative analysis, while the results of qualitative analysis were in turn checked against the results of quantitative analysis in a hermeneutic circle. Initial qualitative analysis consisted of a combination of basic content and thematic analysis similar, for example, to Wiese (2015), Jovanovi´c (2018), and Wright and Brookes (2019). Follow-up qualitative analysis focused on argumentation strategies and specifically topoi in the CDA/DHA tradition. The findings are presented by factor © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Ajši´c, Language and Ethnonationalism in Contemporary West Central Balkans, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72177-0_5

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(i.e., thematic, small ‘d’ discourse) and cluster, where appropriate. The texts referenced below were selected from among the top twenty highest scoring texts on each factor and can be identified as representative by looking up their file codes in the tables showing the top-scoring texts for individual factors in the previous chapter (or Ajši´c, 2015, pp. 112–129). As before, only English translations of text excerpts are provided (for the original Serbian, see Ajši´c, 2015, pp. 149–171).

5.1

Content and Thematic Analysis

Excerpts from texts representative of Factor 2. Factor 2 (‘Endangerment and protection of the Cyrillic script’) points to texts discussing the issues of script choice and status in Serbia, generally, and the (perceived) danger of widespread use of the Latin script to the continued use of the Cyrillic, specifically. These are most often discussed in the context of changes to the constitution that were under consideration during this period (the Factor 2 collocates are in bold): The adoption of the new constitution for Serbia, which has been discussed for a long time now, initiated a discussion about the official script in our country. (BLI-2-9-2006-272, Trbovi´c, 2006)

Another prominent theme is the relationship to the West and the associated process of accession to the European Union: Some people think, he says, that “we cannot join Europe and the world” with our script so we have to switch to the Latin [script]. (POL-16-32003-93, Zejneli, 2003) Today, political needs demand a unification of the Latin script everywhere in the world. (POL-22-8-2006-59, Dželebdži´c, Svilenkovi´c, Radibratovi´c, & Bulatovi´c, 2006) The proponents of a dual-script (Latin and Cyrillic) solution for the Serbian language consider themselves more progressive, insisting that the use of the Latin script is what will bring us closer to the West. (BLI-2-9-2006-272, Trbovi´c, 2006)

As noted above, Factor 2 suggests a discourse of endangerment:

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Today, no nation in the world which cares about its identity and its cultural and national roots neglects its script as much as the Serbian nation does. (POL-16-3-2003-93, Zejneli, 2003) Avramov [the mayor of Šid, an urban area in the province of Vojvodina] came up with the idea to outlaw the Latin script because he was afraid for the Cyrillic. (POL-16-4-2005-91, Laketi´c, 2005)

The claim of endangerment is typically supported by frequent (but selective and flawed) comparisons to language situations elsewhere in the world: [D]o the authors of this proposal know of any other nation in the world which uses somebody else’s script in its own language[?] (POL-11-22005-108, C., 2005) [G]eneral rule: one language – one script, because no nation in the world uses two scripts to write its language. (POL-21-9-2004-72, T., 2004)

The importance of script to the national identity is made explicit: For Serbs the Cyrillic script is part of their identity, it is their important determiner without which they would not have been who they have been and without which they would not be who they are […] this is not about the personal use of the script, but rather about a collective and basic human right of the Serbs to their language and their script. (POL-16-3-2003-93, Zejneli, 2003)

as is the ultimate goal: Everywhere in the world the language and the script of the majority must come first and we ask that this be so here also. (POL-21-9-2004-72, T., 2004)

In addition, the Latin script is often, implicitly or explicitly, indexically linked to, i.e., identified with, the Croats (and, more rarely, Bosniaks): Serbian language had never been written using the Latin script until the moment when the good will to help the South Slavic co-tribesmen Croats finally get their own script was abused. (POL-11-2-2005-108, C., 2005)

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as well as non-South Slavic minorities which, tellingly, are routinely discussed in terms of their relative population sizes: Avramov [the mayor of Šid, an urban area in the province of Vojvodina] thought that the national minorities which do not cross the threshold of fifteen percent of the total population do not have a right to the official use of their mother tongue [and script]. (POL-16-4-2005-91, Laketi´c, 2005)

Interestingly, however, there is also some scant evidence of an alternative argumentation, which nevertheless fits into the discourse of endangerment: Recently, Politika published several texts which claim that the Latin script which Serbs use in their language is not a Serbian but rather “a Croatian script”. This is, undoubtedly, an attempt to again start a campaign against the Latin script and against the “demise of the Serbian Cyrillic”, which has been led by members of several associations for the protection of the Cyrillic and their supporters. Although I am a Serb and although I use only Cyrillic to write in Serbian, I think that their attitude and work are wrong, useless, and even damaging to the Serbian language and Serbia. […] The members of the ‘Cyrillic’ associations and their supporters uselessly throw slogans around such as that the “Serbian Latin script does not exist”, “Latin is not a Serbian but a Croatian script” and so on, and ask if there is another nation in the world which uses somebody else’s script in its language. Of course, there isn’t because every nation considers its own the script it uses regardless of where, when and how it came to be. It is well known, for example, that the characters of the Japanese script originate from China, but the Japanese and others say they use the Japanese script to write. Besides, the French, English and Dutch scripts are identical and yet no one accuses anyone of using somebody else’s script. Those who insist that the Latin script used by the Serbs is “somebody else’s script” do not know or do not want to know that exclusive ownership over any script does not exist in world linguistics. Scripts belong to all languages that use them, either in whole or in part. Therefore, the Latin script, learned and used for as long as ninety years by Serbians and even longer by other Serbs, and by eighty percent of [all] Serbs all the time or part of the time, cannot be somebody else’s but only a Serbian script. […] In order to protect a language and script many different segments of society must be activated and made responsible. Using labels such as “somebody else’s” and “Croatian” to satanize the Latin script will not protect the Serbian Cyrillic. (POL-8-4-2005-138, Radulovi´c, 2005)

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Excerpts from texts representative of Factor 11. Factor 11 (‘Officialization of Bosnian’) suggests a discourse on a change in official Serbian language policy. Unlike Montenegrin in Montenegro (see below), Bosnian was recognized/officialized in Serbia as a minority language largely as a result of the Council of Europe and European Union requirements pertaining to minority rights. Factor 11 thus points to texts discussing the then pending recognition of Bosnian as a minority language and its introduction as a subject in elementary schools in areas with a Bosniak majority, as well as the resistance to this on the part of various political and academic actors in Serbia. Similar to the officialization of Montenegrin, the discussions around the recognition of Bosnian are characterized primarily by a discourse of contestation, as in the following examples: The minister and his assistant said that the Bosnian language did not exist, that regulations did not foresee official use of that language, that curricula and textbooks for that subject had not been approved, that that subject, according to the law and the Rulebook on curricula, could be neither a compulsory nor an elective nor an optional subject in this school year. (POL-11-11-2004-127, Brki´c, 2004, November 11) The Education Board of the Serbian parliament has concluded that the Minister of Education Slobodan Vuksanovi´c [then Serbian Minister of Education] had exceeded his legal authority by approving instruction in the subject Bosnian language with elements of national culture. (POL-15-1-2005-107, Brki´c, 2005)

Interestingly, the contestation is mostly about the name for the language rather than the right to minority status itself: Their request could also be characterized as less than what is already enjoyed by Albanians, Croats, Hungarians… If only the Bosnian language existed. Error or intent – I don’t know why they requested that Bosnian and not Bosniak be taught. Perhaps it’s an error. (POL-12-11-2004-113, Brki´c, 2004, November 12) The official name of the language can only be Bosniak, deriving from the recognized ethnonym ‘Bosniaks’, and not ‘Bosnian’. Bosnia and Herzegovina is a country with three equal nations and Bosniaks should not usurp the right to the Bosnian name. Just a couple of examples which show that for languages used by two or more nations the original name is

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used around the world. Thus, the Austrian nation, which has had a state for a thousand years, speaks German and not Austrian. The Swiss of Germanic origin speak German, not Swiss. American people call their language English, not Anglo-American or American. (POL-10-1-2005-134, Zari´c, 2005) After that an expert opinion was read in the meeting which had been provided to the Educational Board by the SANU Board for the Standardization of the Serbian language from which it can be concluded that in Serbian Bosnian means Bosniak, and in Bosnian – Bosnian. (POL-15-1-2005-107, Brki´c, 2005)

Similar to Factor 10, there is evidence of reliance on (pseudo)scientific argumentation to support the contestation: If linguists say that the Bosnian language exists (as if linguistics was a recent development and we didn’t know which languages existed in the Balkans and around the world), then lawyers need to turn it into paragraphs. (POL-10-1-2005-134, Zari´c, 2005) They noted that the minister said at one time that the Bosnian language did not exist, that he had to wait for an expert opinion on what language was spoken by Bosniaks. (POL-15-1-2005-107, Brki´c, 2005) The language of the Bosniak national minority in Serbia, whose introduction as an elective in the first two grades of elementary school has been announced by the republic Ministry of Education, can, according to the Serbian standard language, be called exclusively Bosniak language, the Board for the Standardization of the Serbian language said. Serbian linguistics clearly says that only the syntagma Bosniak language can be used in Serbian for the standard language used by Bosniaks, Chair of the Board for the Standardization of the Serbian language, academician Ivan Klajn [well-known Serbian linguist and member of SANU], said in response to the parliamentary Education Board’s inquiry. He also said that Serbian linguistics could not, even if it wanted to, determine the name of the language in the Bosniak standard language. “Serbian linguistics cannot do this despite the fact that the leaders of the Bosniak people and Bosniak standard language decided to confuse people in the country and abroad by opting for a language name that was in discrepancy with the name of the people, but people can nevertheless inform themselves about the clarity of categories and the merit of things via the name of

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the language,” said professor Klajn. According to him, it would be illogical to introduce ‘Bosnian’ as the official language for the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnians and Herzegovinans, members of the three [ethnic] national communities who speak three languages – Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian. That would mean an introduction of Bosnian as the state language, while Serbian and Croatian, according to this logic, would have the status of minority languages. (POL-16-2-2005-82, TANJUG, 2005)

However, the Bosniak minority is also sometimes given a voice, albeit rarely, as in the following example: For our culture and for the Bosniaks of Sanjak [a Bosniak majority area in southwest Serbia] this is an exceptional historical event – said author Alija Džogovi´c [Bosniak textbook author in Sanjak/Serbia] on the occasion, noting that “the Bosnian language was outlawed almost a hundred years ago.” (POL-26-10-2004-29, Bakraˇcevi´c, 2004)

In addition, the discourse of contestation is sometimes, albeit very rarely, subverted by politicians such as the then Minister of Education, Slobodan Vuksanovi´c: Bosnian and not Bosniak because, as he explained, the citizens opted for Bosnian as their language, because that’s the traditional name and because he had an opportunity during a trip to Sarajevo with the Serbian President Boris Tadi´c to see for himself that the Bosnian language did exist on the linguistic map. (POL-10-12-2004-127, Brki´c, 2004, December 10)

Excerpts from texts representative of Factors 4 and 8. As noted, Factors 4 and 8 (‘Officialization of Montenegrin 1 and 2’, Cluster 5) point to a thematic discourse on the issue of change in language policy in Montenegro whereby the name of the official language was first changed from Serbian to ‘mother tongue’ (prior to independence) and then from ‘mother tongue’ to Montenegrin (upon independence). Factor 4 points to texts discussing protests against the change in language policy by students and professors of Serbian in Montenegro, some of whom ultimately lost their jobs because of their refusal to implement the new policy: Professors of the Serbian language and literature at the Nikši´c [an urban area in Montenegro] high school, who have boycotted instruction in

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protest against the renaming of their subject to ‘mother tongue’ for six days now, have received support from their colleagues at the school, who in a letter sent to the Ministry of Education of Montenegro threatened a general boycott if their colleagues are fired as has been announced. (POL-8-9-2004-157, Ðuri´c, 2004)

The protesters and various other actors in Serbia itself such as journalists, linguists, and politicians object to the policy on historical, cultural, practical, and (pseudo)scientific grounds: Also the Kotor [an urban area in Montenegro] education workers protested, emphasizing that Serbian had been spoken in their area for centuries. (POL-2-4-2004-166, Be´cirovi´c, 2004, April 2) [T]hat act contributed to the realization of the plan of the authorities and a part of the people in Montenegro to banish from here all associations to Serbhood. (POL-15-4-2004-89, Be´cirovi´c, 2004, April 15) The hunger strikers called on all students and education workers of Nikši´c to join them and raise their voices in “the defense of what is sacred”. (POL-15-4-2004-89, Be´cirovi´c, 2004, April 15) [T]hey have no problem sacrificing the profession and science, history and tradition, or introducing confusion and chaos into the educational system and therefore the society as a whole. (POL-7-7-2004-109, Be´cirovi´c, 2004, July 7) The council holds that the label mother tongue cannot be introduced into curricula for elementary schools and high schools because it is imprecise, linguistically problematic and baseless and because it would cause numerous scientific and professional as well as practical problems…. (POL-2-4-2004-166, Be´cirovi´c, 2004, April 2)

The policy is denounced as mere ‘politicking’ (note the framing of the policy as a ‘scientific’ issue, i.e., instances of pseudoscientific argumentation): Our department has around 300 students and we are all of one mind to not allow the meddling of basest politics in fundamental scientific and linguistic principles. (POL-8-9-2004-157, Ðuri´c, 2004)

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[T]he attempt at norming the Montenegrin language “a politicking project, a product of political manipulation which has no historical, traditional, cultural, symbolic, scientific, or linguistic basis. (POL-5-92008-165, Bruji´c, 2008)

Often, objections are raised by drawing (selective and flawed) comparisons to the outside world: If Americans are OK with calling their language English, I can’t see any reason why someone in Montenegro would have a problem with the name Serbian, or Serbo-Croatian. (POL-7-7-2004-109, Be´cirovi´c, 2004, July 7)

In addition to the texts about the protests, Factor 8 points also to texts which discuss the policy in a wider societal context. The argumentation, however, is similar. There is a contestation discourse relying on claims of purported historical (in)authenticity: All historical sources, [all] literature and the entire cultural heritage of Montenegro is Cyrillic and testifies that the language of Montenegrins has always been and is the Serbian language. (POL-31-3-2004-2, Be´cirovi´c, 2004, March 31) In King Nicholas I’s Law,1 which comprises 83 articles, 13 elementary school subjects are mentioned. First is Christian doctrine, second is Serbian history, and third is the subject of Serbian language. (POL-29-3-2004-25, Be´cirovi´c, 2003, March 29) This is an attempt to introduce a non-existing language, the so-called Montenegrin. (BLI-20-9-2004-204, Bulatovi´c, 2004)

Sometimes, this is coupled by explicit comparisons of the Montenegrin authorities to historical foreign invaders and colonial powers in what appear to be instances of the construction of in- and out-groups (an ‘us vs. them’ argumentation strategy): The first time Serbian and Cyrillic were outlawed was by the AustroHungary, the second time in 1941 the Italians ordered the introduction of the label mother tongue, and now this is being done by the Montenegrin authorities. (POL-31-3-2004-2, Be´cirovi´c, 2004, March 31)

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What Ðukanovi´c [then President of Montenegro] wants has never been accomplished by anyone, not even the Turkish invaders. (BLI-20-9-2004204, Bulatovi´c, 2004)

The theme of (symbolic) historical violence is also carried through to the present: [T]his means a danger of changing history, on the one hand, and of killing the spirit, the being and the creativity of the people, on the other. (POL31-3-2004-2, Be´cirovi´c, 2004, March 31) [P]rotest against the violations of the constitution and violence against language[.] (BLI-9-10-2004-161, B., 2004) Obviously, they are doing this through a forcible change of the identity of Montenegro. (BLI-20-9-2004-204, Bulatovi´c, 2004)

Similar to the texts representative of Factor 4, the argumentation is partly pseudoscientific: The recent years of euphoria of Montenegrin ultra-nationalism have brought deviations in accent, while also a Montenegrin ‘literary’ language has been created by the author [and] professor Dr. Vojislav Nikˇcevi´c [well-known Montenegrin linguist]. He created two new letters for two phonemes which can be heard in Montenegrin localisms. However, that was taken as a basis for political shenanigans around independence, that is a complete erasure of linguistic kin with Serbhood. […] Competent experts, linguists with scientific authority, have claimed since the time of Vuk Karadži´c, the creator of the literary Serbian language, that the language of Montenegrins and Serbs is the same, academician Daši´c [of the Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts] explained. – A language can be, but doesn’t have to be, named after a state. I do not deny the right to those who want to name their language Montenegrin, because everyone has the right to name their language according to their beliefs and feelings. I’m only saying, and linguists have provided scientific argumentation for this, that there are no scientific, linguistic, historical or sociocultural reasons to rename Serbian into Montenegrin. Besides Serbs and Montenegrins, Serbian is spoken in Montenegro also by Muslims and Bosniaks. (POL-31-3-2004-2, Be´cirovi´c, 2004, March 31)

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[M]ontenegrin planners and programmers made an unfortunate choice by opting for the term ‘mother tongue’[.] (POL-29-3-2004-25, Be´cirovi´c, 2003, March 29)

Ultimately, as can be seen below, discourses and ideologies ostensibly about language are often revealed to be about conflicts, societal, political, religious, cultural, scientific or otherwise (Gal, 1998, p. 323): [A]rtificial montage of identity of the people in this area[.] (POL-17-7ˇ 2006-92, Cpajak, 2006) [A] process of assimilation of Serbs has begun and the authorities will, through the raising of the questions of language and the status of the church, through discrimination against the Serbian people, want to transform that people into what they want it to be – [for it] to become a people who declare their nationality to be Montenegrin, who speak the Montenegrin language and belong to the non-existing Montenegrin ˇ church[.] (POL-17-7-2006-92, Cpajak, 2006)2

Excerpts from texts representative of Factors 10 and 6. Finally, in this section, Factors 10 and 6 (‘SANU [Pseudo]Linguistics’ and ‘Contestation over common language [CSS] ownership and name’, Cluster 2) suggest a more general discourse of Central South Slavic ethnolinguistic identity-related contestation, with particular emphasis on the role in its articulation and purveyance played by the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts (SANU). Factor 10 (‘SANU [Pseudo]Linguistics’) suggests a technical pseudoscientific discourse pertaining to language policy, including lexicography and standardization, purveyed primarily by SANU. Texts representative of this factor thus typically discuss language standardization issues, as well as the publication of linguistic studies and books, mostly with the involvement by or support from SANU, as below: The recently published [book] ‘Serbian Syntax’ (‘Beogradska knjiga’ [Belgrade book] Publishers) represents a novelty in the scientific linguistic-grammatical study of the Serbian language. The monumental edition (around 1,600 pages) of the [book] titled “The syntax of the contemporary Serbian language” was published jointly by ‘Beogradska knjiga’, SANU Institute for the Serbian language, and Matica Srpska [Serbian Language Association]. (POL-1-10-2005-165, Fekete, 2005)

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I’ve already said on one occasion that Serbian linguists, as well as the Serbs as a people, have never adopted a clear position on the situation that came about after the dissolution of the common Serbo-Croatian standard language. This is why we lag behind in terms of linguistic activity, which is also a consequence of a lack of broader societal support for the development of the Serbian standard language and the linguistic culture [Milan Šipka, well-known Bosnian Serb linguist]. (POL-5-1-2008-166, Stojakovi´c, 2008)

The most frequent reference in these texts is the Unabridged SANU dictionary of Serbian (in preparation since the 1960s), which also shows up in texts representative of Factor 6: we never paid much attention to such dictionaries because our main project for decades was the Unabridged SANU dictionary of Serbian which, large as it was, was supposed to meet all lexicographic needs. (NIN-3-7-2008-182, Latinovi´c, 2008)

Lastly, the pseudoscientific arguments and a discourse of contestation are present but are comparatively less pronounced: That today they bear (synonymous) national names: Serbian, Croatian, Bosniak/Bosnian, Montenegrin, Bunjevaˇcki, or mother tongue and so on – is really a transformation of a scientific, linguistic principle into a sociolinguistic or national-political concept. (POL-17-6-2006-95, Fekete, 2006)

Factor 6, on the other hand, points to texts explicitly discussing contestation over language ownership and its name as well as linguacultural and ethnic authenticity, primarily involving Serbs and Serbian on the one hand, and Croats and Croatian on the other, as in the following excerpts: The Serbian Linguistic Culture Society, Serbian Learned Society and the Serbian Royal Academy represent three acts in the creation of the most authoritative Serbian scientific institution [SANU]. All three institutions held that Serbs are a South Slavic people who speak their own, Serbian language, which is close to other Slavic languages, but also different from them, as well as that Serbs had three faiths: [Eastern] Orthodox, RomanCatholic and Mohammedan. (POL-10-9-2005-127, Milosavljevi´c, 2005, September 10) Everything Serbian and Croatian was mixed together. This would turn out to be a big mistake because everything that was common, on a

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new and unnatural basis, would soon begin to be divided. That division, projected from the Croatian side, naturally was at Serbian expense. It meant that Serbian culture could keep only what had been created by Orthodox speakers of the Serbo-Croatian language. (POL-24-9-2005-45, Milosavljevi´c, 2005, September 24) The delays in the publishing of the different volumes of the Dictionary are the least problem in terms of damage. It is much more of a problem that the downfall of the Serbian linguistic science that began immediately after the death of Vuk Karadži´c (1864) continues today. Renaming the language from Serbian (which is what it was called during the time of its last reformer) into Serbo-Croatian, Serbian linguists entered a period during which Vuk’s path in the naming and development of the language of the Serbian people was abandoned. That that period still continues is confirmed by the fact that Serbian linguists continue to call their language ‘Serbo-Croatian’ in the Dictionary even after the demise of the ‘SerboCroatian language’. (POL-20-8-2003-80, Draži´c, 2003)

The name for the language is the most prominent point of contention, while the discourses and types of argumentation attested above (i.e., a discourse of ethnolinguistic identity-related contestation, [pseudo]scientific linguistic argumentation) are merged with other similar discursive elements into a discursive formation contesting the linguacultural authenticity and ethnolinguistic identity (and thus, implicitly, political legitimacy) which rests on questionable historical narratives, pseudoscientific linguistic arguments, and selective and transparently flawed comparisons to language situations elsewhere in the world, as in the examples below: When, at the 1861 Croatian Assembly, the issue of the name of the official language was brought up, it was suggested that it be: ‘Croato-Slavonic-Serbian’, ‘Croato-Slavonic’, ‘Croato-Serbian’, ‘Croatian or Serbian’, ‘Croatian’, ‘Serbian’ or ‘people’s language in the three-nation Kindgom’. […] The Assembly adopted a law according to which the official language was called ‘Yugoslav’. Serbs were not satisfied with such a solution. […] In the Yugoslavhood that was offered them, they unmistakably detected a form of Greater-Croatianhood, the aim of which was to erase the Serbian name, Serbian national identity, and even the Serbian national being itself. […] For the reasons mentioned, the Serbian name was thus excluded via a proposal that was attractive and seemingly satisfying for both Serbs and Croats. The Greater-Croatian tendency was thus

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concealed by a Yugoslav name. That name was supposed to trick the Serbs, they were supposed to be slowly but steadily erased from the everyday life of Croatia, to deprive them of political individuality and make them an integral part of a Croatian ‘political’ people. (POL-3-7-2006-192, Kresti´c, 2006) According to this thesis, Vuk Karadži´c took the language spoken by [Eastern] Orthodox East-Herzegovinans as the basis for the standard Serbian literary language. And they, according to this nationalist theory, were in fact Croats converted to [Eastern] Orthodox Christianity, so Serbs ‘stole’ from the Croats the language they call Serbian today, which is why there are so many problems with these languages now. (POL-10-7-2006-142, Arseni´c, 2006) There were many tricks in their labeling, naming and representation of the language. They said it was one, unified, the same and common language. But that doesn’t say whose language it is. Yes, it is one, but Serbian, it is unified, but not also Croatian, it is common, but only in terms of use, not in terms of affiliation and origin. But all this (the language being the same, common and one) cannot be reason enough to dual-label or multiple-label the language, or to entirely rename the Serbian language into Croatian. A language can only be named after the people it belongs to, but not after the names of the peoples who also use it. English is also one, common and the same for all people who speak it, but it is well known whose language it is and what its name is, regardless of who speaks it and where. It is always only English even when it is spoken in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or anywhere else in the world. Such are also the German, Spanish, and Portuguese languages. A language does not belong to him who speaks it, but to him who created it. Serbian people have created their language for centuries. The Croats did not create that language. They got it and took it over ready-made, with all the characteristics that the Serbian language already had. (POL-22-7-2006-55, Medi´c, 2006) Science and politics. Thus, politics began to meddle in science: Science undeniably determined that the Vuk’s Štokavian language is Serbian, politics demanded that it also be Croatian. But when Croatian linguists tyranically throw the Serbian language out of the name and call that Serbian language Croatian, and Croatian alone, Serbian linguists, under the pressure of outdated political ideas and philosophies, continue to stubbornly call their language both Serbian and Croatian (Serbo-Croatian). (POL-22-7-2006-55, Medi´c, 2006)

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Serbian linguists seem to have a hard time understanding that there is no Yugoslavia any more, neither King’s nor Broz’s, in which manipulation also in science was everything, that the ‘Serbo-Croatian language’ is gone for good, that there are no dual-label language names anymore anywhere in Europe or the world (even English is not called, nor has it ever been called, ‘American-English’). Serbian linguists also do not understand what the purpose of the label ‘Serbo-Croatian/Croato-Serbian, or ‘Croatian or Serbian’ language was (only to separate the ‘Croatian literary language’ from the Serbian language, to separate ‘Bosniak’ or ‘Bosnian language’, to now plan the separation of the ‘Montenegrin language’). (POL-20-8-2003-80, Draži´c, 2003) Our linguists are left with a choice between BHMS [Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian] or Serbian. It is time that our linguists turn entirely to science and stop fearing politics already. It would be not only an act of acceptance of scientific values but also a moral act of repentance and apology to Serbian science and the Serbian people. Let them peacefully and freely call the unabridged SANU dictionary a Serbian dictionary. (POL-22-7-2006-55, Medi´c, 2006)

5.2

The Discourse-Historical Approach: Topoi

As mentioned in Chapter 3, preliminary qualitative analysis as well as content and thematic analysis above suggested as particularly relevant and fruitful the discursive strategy of argumentation, i.e., topoi, defined as explicit or inferable obligatory premises which make it possible to connect arguments with a conclusion (Wodak & Meyer, 2009, pp. 319– 320), or simply as “the common-sense reasoning typical for specific issues” (van Dijk 2000 cited in Baker et al., 2008, p. 299). In line with the methodological synergy explicated above (Chapter 3), representative texts identified through quantitative analysis3 were examined also for any relevant topoi. Three relevant topoi were identified: Topos 1: (‘hard’, i.e., structural) linguistics provides irrefutable scientific evidence that the language spoken by Central South Slavs is Serbian in origin (and should therefore be called Serbian only)

The following are representative examples of this topos in top-scoring texts (in English translation; for the original Serbian, see Ajši´c, 2015, pp. 149–169):

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Competent experts, linguists with scientific authority, have claimed since the time of Vuk Karadži´c, the creator of the literary Serbian language, that the language of Montenegrins and Serbs is the same. (POL-31-3-2004-2, Be´cirovi´c, 2004, March 31) Serbian linguistics clearly says that only the syntagma Bosniak language can be used in Serbian for the standard language used by Bosniaks. (POL-162-2005-82, TANJUG, 2005) [L]inguists have provided scientific argumentation that there are no scientific, linguistic, historical or sociocultural reasons to rename Serbian into Montenegrin. (POL-31-3-2004-2, Be´cirovi´c, 2004, March 31)

Topos 2: The polycentricity of Central South Slavic is comparable to the polycentricity of languages such as English, Spanish, Portuguese, or German, all of which bear a single, original label (and so CSS should be called Serbian only)

Typical examples of reliance on Topos 2 in representative texts include the following: If Americans are OK with calling their language English, I can’t see any reason why someone in Montenegro would have a problem with the name Serbian, or Serbo-Croatian. (POL-7-7-2004-109, Be´cirovi´c, 2004, July 7) A couple of examples show that for languages used by two or more nations the original name is used around the world. Thus, the Austrian nation, which has had a state for a thousand years, speaks German and not Austrian. The Swiss of Germanic origin speak German, not Swiss. American people call their language English, not Anglo-American or American. (POL-10-1-2005-134, Zari´c, 2005) A language can only be named after the people it belongs to, but not after the names of the peoples who also use it. English is also one, common and the same for all people who speak it, but it is well known whose language it is and what its name is, regardless of who speaks it and where. It is always only English even when it is spoken in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or anywhere else in the world. Such are also the German, Spanish, and Portuguese languages. (POL-22-7-2006-55, Medi´c, 2006)

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A similar but less prominent topos can also be seen at work in the discourse of endangerment which calls for the defense of the Cyrillic script: Topos 3: The use of the Latin script in Serbian is a threat to the Cyrillic script and Serbian ethnonational identity (therefore, the autochthonous Cyrillic script should be protected by outlawing Latin) Today, no nation in the world which cares about its identity and its cultural and national roots neglects its script as much as the Serbian nation does. (POL-16-3-2003-93, Zejneli, 2003) [D]o the authors of this proposal know of any other nation in the world which uses somebody else’s script in its own language. (POL-11-2-2005108, C., 2005) general rule: one language – one script, because no nation in the world uses two scripts to write its language. (POL-21-9-2004-72, T., 2004)

As can be seen, all three topoi point to the aforementioned pseudoscientific argumentation undergirding broader discourses of endangerment and contestation related to linguacultural authenticity and ethnolinguistic identity, and by extension to the issue of political legitimacy and the right to sovereignty. The pseudoscientific arguments which form the basis of these topoi were already noted in Chapter 4. ‘Science’ and ‘scientific’, for example, were identified by both keyword (ranks 40 and 60, Tables A.1, Appendix A) and collocation (ranks 85 and 256, Table B.1, Appendix B) analysis as items of potential discursive and ideological interest; they also both loaded highly on Factor 10 (Table 4.5) which was shown by cluster analysis to be discursively linked with Factor 6 (Table 4.17), the single most salient manifestation of the discourse of contestation here. This chapter concludes the presentation of results portion of the book. We now turn to a discussion and contextualization of the findings, with a focus on the identified dominant ideological discourses and language ideologies as well as their links to ethnonationalism.

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Notes 1. Nicholas I, Nikola Petrovi´c (1841–1921), king of Montenegro (see Encyclopædia Britannica). 2. Given the historical importance of the Serbian Orthodox Church and its influence on contemporary Serbian society, it was surprising to see only scant references to the church such as this one emerge from both quantitative and qualitative analyses. 3. All excerpts cited here derive from the same publication, Politika, because the lists of representative articles, although they certainly did include articles from other outlets, were dominated by Politika articles, which is thus overrepresented also in the qualitative analysis.

References Primary References Arseni´c, R. (2006, July 10). Ogrešenje o genija [An affront to a genius]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2006/7/10/C12570D70 0350FEDC12571A600748404/ogresenje-o-genija [POL-10-7-2006-142]. B., LJ. (2004, October 9). “Vratite nam srpski jezik” [“Reinstate the Serbian language”]. Blic. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/blic/2004/10/ 9/C1256ED9003F1BEFC1256F29004D603A/vratite-nam-srpski-jezik [BLI-9-10-2004-161]. Bakraˇcevi´c, S. (2004, October 26). Bosanski jezik na c´ irilici [The Bosnian language in Cyrillic]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/pol itika/2004/10/26/C1256ED9003F1BEFC1256F3800751EF7/bosanskijezik-na-cirilici [POL-26-10-2004-29]. Be´cirovi´c, D. (2003, March 29). Jezik po materi [Mother tongue]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2004/3/29/1C9D2176C EF9F394C1256E65007CF08D/jezik-po-materi [POL-29-3-2004-25]. Be´cirovi´c, D. (2004, March 31). Progon srpskog jezika [The banishment of the Serbian language]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/ 2004/3/31/4725D84040EC923CC1256E6700756A64/progon-srpskogjezika [POL-31-3-2004-2]. Be´cirovi´c, D. (2004, April 2). Škole brane srpski [Schools defending Serbian]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2004/ 4/2/4F22929FBBFA4A54C1256E69007D9FE2/skole-brane-srpski [POL-2-4-2004-166]. Be´cirovi´c, D. (2004, April 15). Jezik brane glad-u [Defending the language by hunger]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2004/ 4/15/C23D12DF16321079C1256E7600801967/jezik-brane-gladju [POL15-4-2004-89].

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Be´cirovi´c, D. (2004, July 7). Maternji a srpski [Mother tongue but Serbian]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2004/7/7/625F077D1 4DDEB4AC1256ECA00380725/maternji-a-srpski [POL-7-7-2004-109]. Brki´c, A. (2004, November 11). Bosanski jezik ne postoji [The Bosnian language does not exist]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/pol itika/2004/11/11/C1256ED9003F1BEFC1256F48007BEE14/bosanskijezik-ne-postoji [POL-11-11-2004-127]. Brki´c, A. (2004, November 12). Jezik kojeg nema [The language that isn’t]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2004/11/12/ C1256ED9003F1BEFC1256F49007F417B/jezik-koga-nema [POL-12-112004-113]. Brki´c, A. (2004, December 10). Evropski standardi važe i za Tutin [European standards valid also for Tutin]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-cla nak/politika/2004/12/10/C1256ED9003F1BEFC1256F660003A94E/evr opski-standardi-vaze-i-za-tutin [POL-10-12-2004-127]. Brki´c, A. (2005, January 15). Da li se ministar sapleo o jezik? [Did the minister trip over language]? Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/ 2005/1/15/C1256F7A005A8C61C1256F8A00420830/da-li-se-ministarsapleo-o-jezik [POL-15-1-2005-107]. Bruji´c, Ð. (2008, September 5). U crnogorskim školama jezik i dalje maternji [The language in Montenegrin schools still called mother tongue]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2008/9/5/C12573B50045 C71DC12574BA006C55D0/u-crnogorskim-skolama-jezik-i-dalje-maternji [POL-5-9-2008-165]. Bulatovi´c, P. (2004, September 20). Otpor nasilju! [Resist the violence!]. Blic. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/blic/2004/9/20/C1256ED9003F 1BEFC1256F14006D7CC7/otpor-nasilju [BLI-20-9-2004-204]. C., A. (2005, February 11). Latinica nije srpsko pismo [Latin is not a Serbian script]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2005/2/ 11/C1256F7A005A8C61C1256FA40083C3C4/latinica-nije-srpsko-pismo [POL-11-2-2005-108]. ˇ Cpajak, B. (2006, July 17). Nova država, novi jezik [New state, new language]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2006/ 7/17/C12570D700350FEDC12571AD0075D307/nova-drzava-novi-jezik [POL-17-7-2006-92]. Draži´c, V. (2003, August 20). Kašnjenje najmanji problem [Delay the least of all problems]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2003/ 8/20/C706946AA7EFD884C1256DA40041C834/kasnjenje-najmanji-pro blem [POL-20-8-2003-80]. Dželebdži´c, O., Svilenkovi´c, S., Radibratovi´c, M., & Bulatovi´c, V. (2006, August 22). Pravopisna dilema [An orthographic dilemma]. Politika. http://www.

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arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2006/8/22/C12570D700350FEDC1257 1D1007434AD/pravopisna-dilema [POL-22-8-2006-59]. Ðuri´c, N. M. (2004, September 8). Vlasti proteruju jezik umesto droge [Authorities banishing language instead of drugs]. Politika. http://www. arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2004/9/8/C1256ED9003F1BEFC1256 F090038C101/vlasti-proteruju-jezik-umesto-droge [POL-8-9-2004-157]. Fekete, E. (2005, October 1). Srpska gramatika [Serbian grammar]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2005/10/1/C1256F7A0 05A8C61C125708D006780C4/srpska-gramatika [POL-1-10-2005-165]. Fekete, E. (2006, June 17). Samobitnost srpskog nacionalnog jezika [The identity of the Serbian national language]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/ novinska-clanak/politika/2006/6/17/C12570D700350FEDC1257193002 6A546/samobitnost-srpskog-nacionalnog-jezika [POL-17-6-2006-95]. Gal, S. (1998). Multiplicity and contention among language ideologies: A commentary. In B. B. Schieffelin, K. A. Woolard, & P. V. Kroskrity (Eds.), Language ideologies: Practice and theory (pp. 317–331). Oxford: OUP. Kresti´c, V. (2006, July 3). Velika politiˇcka podvala [Big political chicanery]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2006/7/3/ C12570D700350FEDC125719F007AF18A/velika-politicka-podvala [POL-3-7-2006-192]. Laketi´c, M. (2005, April 16). Ukinuli latinicu [Latin script banned]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2005/4/16/C1256F7A0 05A8C61C1256FE600459B31/ukinuli-latinicu [POL-16-4-2005-91]. Latinovi´c, Z. (2008, July 3). Vujaklija – institucija [Vujaklija—An institution]. NIN. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/nin/2008/7/3/C12 573B50045C71DC125747F004F96D6/vujaklija–institucija [NIN-3-7-2008182]. Medi´c, M. (2006, July 22). Naši i njihovi jezici [Our and their languages]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2006/ 7/22/C12570D700350FEDC12571B60030D638/nasi-i-njihovi-jezici [POL-22-7-2006-55]. Milosavljevi´c, P. (2005, September 10). Dva razliˇcita jezika [Two different languages]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2005/ 9/10/C1256F7A005A8C61C1257078004B9BAB/dva-razlicita-jezika [POL-10-9-2005-127]. Milosavljevi´c, P. (2005, September 24). Promena naziva jezika [The change in the language name]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/ 2005/9/24/C1256F7A005A8C61C12570880056C15E/promena-nazivajezika [POL-24-9-2005-45]. Radulovi´c, R. (2005, April 8). Latinica je i srpsko pismo [Latin is a Serbian script also]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2005/

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4/8/C1256F7A005A8C61C1256FDD00389F1F/latinica-je-i-srpsko-pismo [POL-8-4-2005-138]. Stojakovi´c, B. (2008, January 5). Kanimo se profesionalki [Let us refrain from using ‘women professionals’]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-cla nak/politika/2008/1/5/C12573B50045C71DC12573C80068A8E4/kan imo-se-profesionalki [POL-5-1-2008-166]. TANJUG. (2005, February 16). Jezik Bošnjaka u Srbiji zove se bošnjaˇcki jezik [The language of Bosniaks in Serbia is called the Bosniak language]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2005/2/16/C1256F7A0 05A8C61C1256FA9007BA6EC/jezik-bosnjaka-u-srbiji-zove-se-bosnjackijezik [POL-16-2-2005-82]. T., S. (2004, September 21). Prvo naše pismo, pa ostala [Our script before others]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2004/9/ 21/C1256ED9003F1BEFC1256F1500764EC9/prvo-nase-pismo-pa-ostala [POL-21-9-2004-72]. Trbovi´c, A. S. (2006, September 2). Zašto je važno zaštititi c´ irilicu [Why it’s important to protect the Cyrillic]. Blic. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-cla nak/blic/2006/9/2/C12570D700350FEDC12571DE00472AF8/zasto-jevazno-zastititi-cirilicu [BLI-2-9-2006-272]. Zari´c, M. (2005, January 10). Bošnjaˇcki jezik, a ne bosanski [The Bosniak, not the Bosnian language]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/ politika/2005/1/10/C1256F7A005A8C61C1256F84007B9108/bosnjackijezik-a-ne-bosanski [POL-10-1-2005-134]. Zejneli, Z. (2003, March 16). Potisnuto srpsko pismo [Serbian script supressed]. Politika. http://www.arhiv.rs/novinska-clanak/politika/2003/ 3/16/2520ED59AEE19C58C1256CED00331CF3/potisnuto-srpsko-pismo [POL-16-3-2003-93].

Secondary References Ajši´c, A. (2015). Language ideologies, public discourses, and ethnonationalism in the Balkans: A corpus-based study (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ. Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., KhosraviNik, M., Krzyzanowski, M., McEnery, T., & Wodak, R. (2008). A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in UK press. Discourse & Society, 19(3), 273–306. Encyclopædia Britannica. (2020, October 3). Nicholas I. http://www.britannica. com/EBchecked/topic/414057/Nicholas-I. Jovanovi´c, S. M. (2018). Assertive discourse and folk linguistics: Serbian nationalist discourse about the Cyrillic script in the 21st century. Language Policy, 17, 611–631. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-018-9478-2.

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Wiese, H. (2015). “This migrants’ babble is not a German dialect!”: The interaction of standard language ideology and “us”/”them” dichotomies in the public discourse on a multiethnolect. Language in Society, 44, 341–368. Wodak, R., & Meyer, M. (2009). Critical discourse analysis: History, agenda, theory and methodology. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis (pp. 1–33). Sage. Wright, D., & Brookes, G. (2019). ‘This is England, speak English!’: A corpusassisted critical study of language ideologies in the right-leaning British press. Critical Discourse Studies, 16(1), 56–83. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 17405904.2018.1511439.

CHAPTER 6

Language-Related Discourses, Language Ideologies, and Ethnonationalism

Abstract This chapter switches the focus from the presentation of results and their methodological comparison to a contextualized interpretation of the findings, with a specific focus on the links between mainstream public language-related discourse, dominant language ideologies, and ethnic identities and nationalism. Specifically, the chapter identifies the main thematic and ideological discourses in evidence in the research corpus, discourses of endangerment and contestation, as well as recurrent topoi to identify, define, and explain the dominant language ideologies, particularly as they pertain to ethnic identities and nationalism in contemporary West Central Balkans, thereby demonstrating the proposed three-step approach to identification of language ideologies (thematic discourses > ideological discourses > language ideologies). The principal language ideology identified is shown to be linked to the language philosophy of Johann Gottfried Herder as well as the nineteenth-century Romantic nationalism. Keywords Language-related discourse · Endangerment · Contestation · Dominant language ideology · Topoi · Johann Gottfried Herder · Romantic nationalism · Ethnonationalism

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Ajši´c, Language and Ethnonationalism in Contemporary West Central Balkans, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72177-0_6

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Even if our political independence were lost we should still keep our language and our literature, and thereby always remain a nation; so we could easily console ourselves for the loss of everything else. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1807/1808)

6.1

The Discourse of Endangerment

Two principal dominant ideological (‘D’) language-related discourses were identified in this study, a discourse of endangerment and a discourse of contestation. The discourse of endangerment itself has two dimensions. The first dimension focuses on the perceived threat to the Serbian language and the Cyrillic script, and by extension the Serbian ethnonational identity, posed by the use of the Latin script in Serbian (Topos 3, cf. Jovanovi´c, 2018). In this discourse, the possession, protection and continued (exclusive) use of an autochthonous script (i.e., Cyrillic) are billed as a precondition as well as guarantee for the maintenance of an ethnolinguistic identity (i.e., Serbian). According to this view, this necessitates the protection of the Cyrillic as the autochthonous Serbian script by outlawing Latin in official use. Perhaps somewhat unusually among the world’s languages, Central South Slavic uses both Latin and Cyrillic. While the scripts themselves are fully equivalent, the difference between them is in their sociohistorical origins and thus sociolinguistic in nature. Despite the equivalence, the Cyrillic script has historically been strongly associated with the Serbian ethnonational identity, whereas the Latin script, largely because it provides a means of distinction from the Serbs, is strongly preferred by the Bosniaks, Croats, and now Montenegrins also. Here, then, we see a macro example of ‘(indirect) indexicality’, or “conventional/stereotypical relationships between linguistic forms and social meanings” (Jaffe, 2016) as well as a macro example of what Irvine and Gal (2000) call ‘iconization’, or the mapping of linguistic features onto social images, positing a direct link between one or more linguistic features and (an essentialist conceptualization of) the nature of the persons or social groups who display them (cf. Greenberg, 2017/2018). The Latin script is in widespread use also among the Serbs themselves, both in Serbia and elsewhere, for reasons of practicality but also because it has come to be associated with modernity and the Western civilization (another example of indexicality and iconization as well as ‘fractal recursivity’ [Irvine & Gal, 2000], or the projection of binary oppositions from one level of relationship to another, e.g., inter-

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to intra-ethnic). However, the Cyrillic script is preferred in institutional contexts and has never been in true danger of being phased out or falling into disuse. There rather seems to exist a kind of script diglossia,1 whereby the Cyrillic script, in further examples of indexicality and iconization, is used in most official institutional contexts (including, significantly, the Serbian Orthodox Church) and is associated with political conservatism and cultural traditionalism, while the Latin script is mainly used in popular culture and is associated with political liberalism and modernity. This assertion of the endangerment of the Cyrillic (cf. Jovanovi´c, 2018) is thus a gross, deliberate exaggeration, so the calls for its protection have primarily ideological and political motivations. Serbian society has traditionally harbored a cult of victimhood since the defeat by the Ottoman Turks in 1389 in Kosovo (see, e.g., Biserko, 2012), while vocal self-interested public proclamations of endangerment of all things Serbian have become so pervasive (and, for individuals, often profitable) since the breakup of Yugoslavia that there are now widely used expressions such as srbovati ‘to Serb’ and profesionalni Srbin ‘a professional Serb’ to (mockingly) refer to the phenomenon.2 Most proclamations of the endangerment of the Cyrillic in this data set (and in general) thus come from the fringe (civic associations and minor-league academics) that harbors extremist political views; nevertheless, they are often given weight by public figures including prominent academics as well as enormous (undue) attention and space in mainstream media (using a different data set and a different method, Jovanovi´c [2018] corroborates this as well as the other Cyrillic-related findings here). Arguably, this dimension of the discourse of endangerment (of the Cyrillic script) is also part of a broader discourse of declining language standards (arising from the standard language ideology), often termed a ‘moral panic’ (Cohen, 1972), which is widely attested in public (and, again, particularly lay) language-related discourses in many other societies (see, e.g., Johnson & Ensslin, 2007, especially Part II; papers in Partington, 2010), and Serbian society does not seem to be an exception in this respect. Note, finally, that the calls to banish the Latin script from Serbian altogether represent an (unsuccessful) attempt at ‘erasure’, or the simplification of a sociolinguistic field through which some persons, social groups, or sociolinguistic phenomena are rendered invisible in ideologically and politically convenient ways (Irvine & Gal, 2000), i.e., the use of two scripts in Serbian and the implication this has for an essentialist understanding of ethnolinguistic identity (cf. Greenberg, 2017/2018).

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The second dimension of the discourse of endangerment focuses on the perceived threat to the Serbian language and ethnonational identity posed by the post-Yugoslav political and cultural independence of other Central South Slavs and their concomitant exercise of their right to name the common language to reflect their own separate identities (i.e., Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin). Though equally baseless and ultimately absurd, this second dimension of the discourse of endangerment is purveyed largely by leading academic linguists, many of whom, such as Pavle Ivi´c and Ivan Klajn for instance, have been members of SANU (cf. Tollefson, 2002, esp. pp. 70–71), as well as other academics and prominent writers (again, often members of SANU) and, more often than not, Serbian politicians and, sometimes (though not attested here), also members of the clergy in the Serbian Orthodox Church.3 As could be seen from the many samples of this discourse cited above, there is an insistence on (and perhaps also a belief in) the Serbian ethnic origins of all Central South Slavs (i.e., all Central South Slavs are “Vuk’s Serbs of different faiths”, not legitimate separate ethnic groups), often including the Eastern Orthodox Macedonians who speak a related but separate South Slavic language. The argument, based on this pseudoscientific theory of ethnic origins and the tradition started by Vuk Karadži´c as well as the politically convenient interpretation of the Romantic language ideology according to which language is the only valid criterion for ethnonational affiliation, is that the “renaming” of the erstwhile common language, the Serbo-Croatian, after or by non-Serb CSS ethnic groups (again, Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin), represents rasparˇcavanje ‘partitioning’ (a recurrent theme in public discourse in Serbia since the breakup of Yugoslavia and a keyword in the sense of Williams, 1976) of the Serbian Volk (‘narod’, another keyword in this sense) and therefore a step towards its ultimate destruction. Figure 6.1 shows the concordance lines for rasparˇcavanje, from the partitioning of the Byzantine empire (line 1) to the partitioning of the Balkans (lines 2, 7) to the partitioning of Yugoslavia (lines 3, 4, 6) to the partitioning of the (Serbian) language and literature (lines 5, 8, 10–18) to the partitioning of the Vinˇca Institute of Nuclear Sciences at the University of Belgrade (9, 19, 20). As can be seen, the discourse prosody and the range of applications for (the decidedly negative, even apocalyptic, term) rasparˇcavanje point to a comprehensive discourse of endangerment with some historically continuity. It should be noted that a similar discourse of endangerment

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Fig. 6.1 Concordance Lines for Rasparˇcavanje ‘Partitioning’ in SERBCORP

is evident in the now infamous SANU Memorandum (SANU, 1986), although the focus there was on the “threat” from the Croats since Bosniaks and Montenegrins had not yet asserted themselves politically by the mid 1980s when the memorandum was drafted (more on this below).

6.2

The Discourse of Contestation

The second dominant ideological LRD identified in this study is the discourse of contestation. This discourse is inextricably linked to the discourse of endangerment, only here emphasis is on arguments the ultimate aim of which is to delegitimize non-Serb CSS ethnolinguistic and therefore ethnonational identities and with them their political legitimacy and ultimately non-Serb CSS groups’ rights to territory and sovereignty (cf. Kamusella, 2018, p. 174). Both the discourse of contestation and the discourse of endangerment rely on pseudoscientific argumentation indexing an essentialist ideology which posits “imagined inherent, natural links between a unitary mother tongue, a territory, and an ethnonational identity” (Irvine & Gal, 2000, p. 60) and an instrumentalization of linguistics for political purposes. Typically, the discourse of contestation relies on either Topos 1 or Topos 2, or both (see Text sample

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6 above). Topos 1 casts the issue of language name as a ‘scientific’ problem which has been conclusively settled, although it is never quite explained exactly what this means or what the scientific methodology used to reach this conclusion was, except for occasional vague references to (more or less obscure) dialectological studies. Regardless, the claim is repeatedly made that the only ‘scientifically’ justified name for CSS is ‘Serbian’. Topos 2, similarly, draws a selective, flawed comparison between the polycentricity of CSS and erstwhile colonial languages such as English, Spanish, Portuguese, or German,4 arguing that in the cases of such polycentricity the ‘original’ name is always retained even if the language is used by different nations. The fact that colonial languages were transplanted to the new nations largely via colonialist enterprises is ignored and is, in fact, rather indicative of the conceptualization behind this argument (i.e., the Serbian ethnic nation as the ‘mother’ nation of all Central South Slavic ethnic nations); the fact that Serbian was not transplanted from Serbia to other Central South Slavic nations in similar fashion is also ignored. Simultaneously, inconvenient examples of polycentricity such as, for instance, that in Scandinavia (see, e.g., Vikør, 2000) or Hindi/Urdu, which is nearly identical to that with Central South Slavic in several respects (e.g., a high degree of mutual comprehensibility, different scripts, correlation between linguistic, ethnic and religious affiliations), are entirely ignored. Subscribing to the concept of ‘homogeneism’, a belief in the “impossibility of heterogeneous communities and the naturalness of homogeneous communities” (Blommaert & Verschueren, 1998, p. 207), and firmly entrenched in (Western) European nationalist ideologies according to which “the absence of the feature ‘distinct language’ tends to cast doubts on the legitimacy of claims to nationhood” (ibid., p. 192), the proponents of Serbian linguistic ethnonationalism thus contest the non-CSS ethnic groups’ right to (linguistic) self-determination and advance “claims of linguistic affiliation […] because they are also claims to territory and sovereignty” (Irvine & Gal, 2000, p. 72, my italics).

6.3 Monolingualism and Standard Language Ideology The quantitative evidence from keyword and collocation analysis showed that, at the most general level, language is routinely conceptualized in terms of binary oppositions of implicitly monologic, standardized

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linguistic codes indexing distinct monolithic national identities (cf. standard language ideology, Milroy, 2001). This was indicated by the frequent use of glottonyms which imply monoglot standardized national languages with clearly demarcated boundaries between them (e.g., Serbian, English), as well as sets of possessive pronouns constructing inand out-groups and implying these groups’ ownership over their language (e.g., our, own, cf. ‘banal nationalism’, Billig, 1995). At the level of the general public language-related discourse, then, the dominant language ideology in evidence is one of societal monolingualism and a natural oneto-one correspondence between language and (ethno)national identity, which at the same time, again, seems to be an expression of homogeneism. However, despite the binary difference and the emphasis on an “us and them” view of collective identity, the differences between what are understood as distinct, mutually-incomprehensible language varieties without a common origin or history are naturalized and taken for granted and so there is little evidence of identity-related contestation across ‘hard’ ethnic boundaries (Giles, 1979 cited in Greenberg 2017/2018). In other words, only intra-linguistic (i.e., ‘soft’, Central South Slavic) identities are contested here. Note, further, the familiar tendency to emphasize the differences projected outwardly (i.e., internationally) and minimize (or erase) those projected inwardly (i.e., intranationally), which is a classic characteristic of nationalism (see, e.g., Hobsbawm, 1990; see also Busch, 2010). It will be obvious that this is yet another instance of the ideological mechanism of erasure discussed above, whereby intra-linguistic (i.e., dialectal) differences are minimized or completely erased, which devalues and marginalizes most language use by most members of the speech community and renders it deficient, illegitimate, and therefore unfit for domains of consequence such as national politics and media and higher education. It is also worth noting that this language ideology can be traced back to the language philosophy of John Locke as “a cornerstone of scientific conceptions of language” (Bauman & Briggs, 2000, p. 195) according to which “the language of […] public discourse must be a purified, standardized, plain variety of the national language […] one voice, in one language (ibid., p. 197), as well as Johann Gottfried Herder whose “vision of political community is clear in its principled insistence on linguistic and discursive standardization: social and political cohesion demand one language, one metadiscursive order, one voice (ibid., p. 201).

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6.4 Language as the Essence of Ethnonational Identity The attested patterns, of course, are entirely different at the level of the much less distinct and geographically and culturally closer regional (i.e., Central South Slavic) ethnolinguistic identities. Here, even the most basic quantitative analysis pointed to the prominence of lexical items such as name, label, renaming and (does not) exist and thus an obsession with the symbolism of the name for the shared language, as well as a tendency toward the denial of distinction and contestation of the validity and legitimacy of separate language names and ethnolinguistic identities. N-gram analysis, for example, confirmed this tendency and showed that it pertained to a limited set of Central South Slavic ethnolinguistic identities (e.g., the renaming of the Serbian language into Montenegrin), while factor analysis showed the (ideological, ‘D’) discourses of endangerment and, particularly, contestation to be the most dominant, extending across six of the twelve identified factors (i.e., thematic, ‘d’ discourses). The dominant conceptualization of language here is still one of a natural oneto-one correspondence between language and ethnonational identity and thus also homogeneism, but now the boundaries between in- and outgroups are much less clearly defined as the lack of linguistic distinction is seen as problematic and used to undermine the legitimacy of the claims to separate identities (as elsewhere in Europe, cf. Blommaert & Verschueren, 1998). The contradiction between such contestation and the obvious sociolinguistic reality is often resolved by demoting non-Serb CSS ethnolinguistic identities to sub-national status (comparing or equating Bosnian or Montenegrin, for instance, with dialects such as those of Dalmatia in Croatia or Šumadija in Serbia), and, as we shall see in Chapter 7, labeling the competing ethnolinguistic standards “political”, i.e., inauthentic. Clearly, then, the politics of language in West Central Balkans is identity politics (Wodak, 2018) as well as the politics of sociopolitical framing in which groups struggle to acquire a favorable frame in which they are a dominant majority, somewhat akin to the politics of manipulating election district boundaries, or gerrymandering, in the United States (cf. ‘normative isomorphism’, Kamusella, 2018). Ultimately, the dominant language ideology in the mainstream Serbian newspaper discourse is an essentialist one, conflating language, literature, and script, and insisting on language as the “soul of a people”, an embodiment of the putative, immutable, primordial character of the ethnic nation that created it, e.g.:

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For Serbs the Cyrillic script is part of their identity, it is their important determiner without which they would not have been who they have been and without which they would not be who they are […]. (POL-16-32003-93, Zejneli, 2003) Professor Lompar [School of Philology, University of Belgrade] believes this is about an “ideological project”: “The aim here is to reduce literature to a mere art form, to a fine-art status such as that of painting or music, but it is not only an art form. This would mean a neglect of its cultural, historical, anthropological aspects. Because, in contrast to other nations, for Serbs literature is a crucial constituent of national identity, proof of existence throughout the long duration of the Turkish centuries. This is why the reduction of literature to its media, functional aspect is detrimental for us and equal to an erasure of identity. (NIN-13-3-2003-381, Latinovi´c, 2003)

Underlying the discourses of endangerment and contestation here, then, are an imported essentialist Western language ideology, often condensed as the triad one nation—one language—one territory/state (see, e.g., Busch, 2010; Kamusella, 2018), which is often traced to the language philosophy of John Locke and, particularly, Johann Gottfried Herder (1968),5 as well as articulations of German nationalism by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1922), and the Romantic movement more generally (see ˇ Bauman & Briggs, 2000, 2003; Colovi´ c, 2004; Garcia, 2012; Haque, 2015; Ili´c, 2014; Okey, 2004); the pan-European nationalist ideology according to which “the absence of the feature ‘distinct language’ tends to cast doubts on the legitimacy of claims to nationhood” (Blommaert & Verschueren, 1998, p. 192); and a Slavic language ideology sometimes termed slovesnost in Serbian (roughly, nationally-conscious learnedness, literacy, tradition) which encompasses language, script, and literature and treats them as constituent parts of a unified ethnolinguistic system.6 Examination of the context (Blackledge, 2008) behind the discourses of endangerment and contestation reveals that there exist multiple links between LRDs and LIs in the mainstream Serbian press and Serbian ethnonationalism, and a common institutional site, SANU, as well as wide acceptance of this discursive and ideological formation in Serbian society during this period and up to the present.7 Based on these findings, we can conclude that, in the case of Serbia and the Balkans, language ideologies (and language-related discourses) are indeed not “about language alone” (Woolard, 1998, p. 3), as ‘ideologies that appear to be about language, when carefully re-read, are revealed to be coded stories about political,

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religious, or scientific conflicts’ (Gal, 1998, p. 323), as well as that “[t]he continuing intensity of contestation” over language and ethnonational identity is: […] hardly surprising, given the consequences envisaged and authorized by the reigning language ideology and occasionally enacted under its auspices. It is an ideology in which claims of linguistic affiliation are crucial and exclusivist because they are also claims to territory and sovereignty. (Irvine & Gal, 2000, p. 72, my emphasis)

In other words, to make a reference to a somewhat similarly intractable conflict situation of the Middle East, “[t]he political and military conflicts have stopped but the linguistic conflict goes on” (Abd-el-Jawad & Al-Haq, 1997, p. 439; see also Bilkic, 2018). Given the widely recognized link between modernity and nationalism (e.g., Conversi, 2012; Hajdarpaši´c, 2015; Ichijo, 2013), it is easy to see that the logic of provoking and prolonging this artificial and unnecessary conflict is a paradoxical mashup of a primordial view of ethnicity and a modernist nation-building project: Constructing language and tradition and placing them in relationship to nature/science and society/politics continues to play a key role in producing and naturalizing new modernist projects, new sets of legislators, and new forms of social inequality. Which is not to say that the “new” does not often bear a remarkable resemblance to what has come before, often centuries earlier. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine a time that the power of this process was more apparent than at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. (Bauman & Briggs, 2003, p. 301)

To combat these projects, in the CDA tradition, we need to expose them analytically, and take a stand vis-à-vis the ideologies undergirding them, fully recognizing the impossibility of ideology-free positions.8 As in any context riddled with pathological contestation, the best course of action is to follow theorists such as Gramsci (1971) and Gee (2010) in their appeals to judge ideologies simply in terms of their social effects (rather than their truth values, for example). What, then, are the historical background, and the sociopolitical and intertextual contexts to the Serbian linguistic ethnonationalism attested here, and, ultimately, what have been its social effects?

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6.5 The Role of Language in the Serbian Ethnonationalist Project Proclamations of ethnolinguistic endangerment and contestation go hand in hand and are not a new phenomenon in the Balkans, nor are they limited to the Central South Slavic area.9 In addition to the contestation we note today, there have been earlier historical examples, sometimes making equally absurd claims, such as the theory developed by German nationalists in the nineteenth century (“Windischentheorie”) according to which Carinthian Slovene dialects were more closely related to Germanic than to Slavic languages, or the orchestrated negation of Macedonian identity by the Greeks, Bulgarians, and Serbs, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century, which still continues today (for details about these, see Voss, 2006). All this contestation has two things in common. The first is a focus on the role of language in ethnonational identity. As the French-Serbian scholar, Yves Tomi´c, notes in his expert report on the ideology of Greater Serbia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries written for the United Nation’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (UN ICTY) in The Hague (Tomi´c, n.d.), at the root of the Greater Serbian ideology is the Romantic language ideology according to which language is the only valid criterion for the determination of national identity (more on this below; see also Carmichael, 2000). The second feature shared by the Balkan contestations is the instrumentalization of linguistics in nationalist projects. According to Friedman (1999, p. 20): At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries (and even today, see, e.g., Glenny, 1995), linguists were putting their knowledge at the service of politicians by choosing one or another isogloss as the definitive justification for their ethnic identity – and therefore nationality […]. [L]inguistic features become ‘flags’ that are manipulated to represent territorial claims. […]. The claims about nationality [a]re then translated into claims for the territory to be included in the nation-state.

In his study of the negations of the Macedonian ethnolinguistic identity, Voss (2006, pp. 120–122) thus writes that “even in Yugoslav times we notice the coincidence of national language ideology and ethnic identity ideology”, a contradiction which “becomes even sharper after 1991” when “cultural policy became a tool in the rivalry of post-communist elites” and which “remains unresolved today”.

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Arguably, however, cultural policy has been a go-to tool in the nationalist projects much longer. In her book, Yugoslavia’s implosion: The fatal attraction of Serbian nationalism, Sonja Biserko, a former Yugoslav diplomat and the president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, traces the origins of contemporary Serbian nationalism back to the beginnings of the nineteenth century, “the formative period of Serbia as a nation-state” (Biserko, 2012, p. 34), and the idea of resurrection of the fourteenth-century Serbian medieval empire, “a patriarchal, Orthodox, ethnically homogeneous state” (p. 33). This idea, known as “Greater Serbia” throughout the twentieth century, was first formulated into a national strategy in 1844 in a work by Ilija Garašanin, prime minister of Serbia in 1852 and between 1861 and 1867 (see Encyclopædia Britannica), famously titled “Naˇcertanije” (Draft plan, Garašanin, 2007). The plan envisaged a resurrection of the medieval Serbian state which had been destroyed by the Ottoman Turks by integrating all Balkan territories populated by Serbs, either as a majority or as a minority, into a single state. These included large parts of Croatia, Vojvodina (part of Hungary at the time), Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and the northern part of Albania (Tomi´c, n.d., p. 13). The plan has also been widely known by an oft-repeated formula which summarizes it as “all Serbs in one state”. However, much like elsewhere in Europe, this was a time of Romanticism and inception of the national consciousness,10 when collective identities were much less clearly delineated and much more fluid than they are today, so it was not always clear who the Serbs, for example, were (see, e.g., Hajdarpaši´c, 2015; Lindstedt & Wahlström, 2012). For Serbian nationalists this dilemma would be conclusively solved by the Serbian linguist and ethnographer, Vuk Karadži´c, who created the Serbian Cyrillic script and initiated the standardization of modern Serbian. In his pamphlet, indicatively titled Srbi svi i svuda (‘Serbs, all and everywhere’, Karadži´c, 2006), written in 1836 and first published in 1849, Karadži´c demarcated the national Serbian territories and launched an ethnic origins theory of Serbs as a people of several faiths (i.e., Orthodox, Catholic, and “Mohammedan”) unified by a common language (see, for example, Tomi´c, n.d., pp. 8–9). Indeed, Western analysts of nineteenth-century Balkans nationalist ideologies such as Behschnitt (1980, p. 71, cited in Tomi´c, n.d., p. 10, Note 13), consider the ideas of Vuk Karadži´c to be the “linguistic and cultural ideology of Greater Serbia” (cf. Ili´c, 2014).11 As Biserko (2012) notes, there is a clear ideological continuity in Serbian nationalism in the last two centuries, from the formation of Serbia

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as a nation-state in the first half of the nineteenth century, to the two world wars and two Yugoslav states in the first half of the twentieth century, to the breakup of Yugoslavia and the ensuing Yugoslav wars at the end of the twentieth century (see also Hajdarpaši´c, 2015). However, for our purposes here, one other historical moment is particularly important. As noted in the introduction, Yugoslavia was showing signs of internal struggles and instability already before Josip Broz Tito’s death in 1980.12 This trend was accelerated by the political and economic uncertainties in the period following Tito’s death. Again, as mentioned above, Serbian elites tended to view Yugoslavia as a form of Greater Serbia and therefore tried to impose a centralization of the state which was opposed primarily by the Slovenes and Croats. In this climate and very much in the longstanding Serbian tradition of drafting conspiratorial nationalist strategies, a group of Serbian intellectuals, members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) at least one of whom was a leading linguist (Pavle Ivi´c; see Tollefson, 2002), drafted the infamous SANU Memorandum in the fall of 1986 (SANU, 1986). The memorandum alleged the Serbs and Serbia to be in an “unequal position” and “endangered” in Yugoslavia, and blamed the 1974 constitution which decentralized the country and gave greater rights to individual republics, arguably a historically and politically valid arrangement but one in which Serbs were a minority everywhere outside of Serbia itself. As Biserko (2012, p. 82) further contends, “[i]n essence, the Memorandum reiterated the Serbian national agenda from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, calling for ‘the liberation and unification of the entire Serbian people and the establishment of a Serbian national and state community on the whole Serbian territory’.” Needless to say, the Memorandum was and continues to be widely regarded in the former Yugoslavia as the definitive statement of the contemporary iteration of the Serbian nationalist program, the Greater Serbia, which was the principal cause of the 1990s Yugoslav wars. Most interestingly, the Memorandum mentions the noun ‘language’ ten times, the noun ‘linguists’ one time, and the adjective ‘linguistic’ three times in its thirty-two pages of text, purveying discourses of endangerment and contestation and an essentialist, ethnonationalist language ideology rather similar to those attested above (for the original Serbian, see SANU, 1986): Manipulation of language […] Unlike national minorities, parts of the Serbian people, living in other republics in considerable numbers, do not have the right to use their own

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language and script, to organize politically and culturally, to participate in the joint development of a unified culture of their people. [I]mposition of an official language which bears the name of another people (Croatian), which illustrates national inequality […] That language was made compulsory also for the Serbs in Croatia through a constitutional decree, while the nationalist Croatian linguists continue to distance it from the language in other republics of the SerboCroatian language area through systematic and well-organized actions, which contributes to the weakening of the links between the Serbs in Croatia and other Serbs. The practical meaning of statements such as “we must take care of”, “we need to fight”, “Cyrillic should be taught more often”, etc., can be evaluated only against the real language policy in the Federal Republic of Croatia. The zeal whose aim is to create a separate Croatian language, opposed to the idea of a common language of Croats and Serbs, does not leave much long-term prospect to the Serbian people in Croatia of preserving their national identity. As a consequence of the ruling ideology, the cultural inheritance of the Serbian people is being alienated, appropriated, or devalued, neglected or left to ruin, the language is being suppressed, and the Cyrillic script is being gradually lost.

Although Topoi 1 and 2 featuring the pseudoscientific arguments on language attested above are missing here, Topos 3 and the discourse of endangerment are present and are more pronounced than above, while the discourse of contestation is implicit rather than explicit. Apparently, the discourse of Serbian linguistic ethnonationalism evolved between 1986 and the early 2000s, adapting to the changing circumstances and replacing the alarmist, mobilizing discourse of endangerment of the prewar and wartime periods with pseudoscientific argumentation which is more in line with and more likely to be effective in a post-war period characterized by widespread conflict fatigue. Further, the Croats are clearly labeled as the enemy through a discursive construction as an out-group via a ‘collective narrative’ (Ili´c, 2014; cf. Jovanovi´c, 2018) and by way of predication strategies such as labeling them “nationalist” and “zeal(ous)” which are then used to justify the proposed action (i.e., a recentralization of the Yugoslav state). In other words, all the main elements of the discourse complex of Serbian linguistic ethnonationalism which we saw above are on display here also. This is confirmed by the results of quantitative analysis which identified Vuk Karadži´c and SANU as pertinent lexical items in the research corpus: both Vuk Karadži´c and SANU are identified as both keywords and significant collocates, while SANU

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also shows up in n-grams multiple times (Table 4.4) as well as Factor 10 (Table 4.5). Similarly, the results of qualitative analysis exemplify the routine references to Vuk Karadži´c and the work done within SANU and thus the links between language and ethnonationalism in Serbia, as in the following example, It is much more of a problem that the downfall of the Serbian linguistic science that began immediately after the death of Vuk Karadži´c (1864) continues today. Renaming the language from Serbian (which is what it was called during the time of its last reformer) into Serbo-Croatian, Serbian linguists entered a period during which Vuk’s path in the naming and development of the language of the Serbian people was abandoned. That that period still continues is confirmed by the fact that Serbian linguists continue to call their language ‘Serbo-Croatian’ in the Dictionary even after the demise of the ‘Serbo-Croatian language’. (POL-20-8-2003-80, Draži´c, 2003) The Serbian Linguistic Culture Society, Serbian Learned Society and the Serbian Royal Academy represent three acts in the creation of the most authoritative Serbian scientific institution [SANU]. All three institutions held that Serbs are a South Slavic people who speak their own, Serbian language, which is close to other Slavic languages, but also different from them, as well as that the Serbs had three faiths: Orthodox, Roman-Catholic and Mohammedan. (emphasis mine; POL-10-9-2005-127, Milosavljevi´c, 2005, September 10)

The dominant contemporary language-related discourses and language ideologies in evidence in the mainstream Serbian press therefore seem largely to derive from the revived Serbian ethnonationalist program first articulated in nineteenth-century cultural and strategic policy work by Vuk Karadži´c and Ilija Garašanin, as well as the 1986 SANU Memorandum, and are employed as a cultural policy tool in the various aspects of the realization of this program and establishment of a Greater Serbian hegemony in the South Slavic area of the Balkans. Alternative yet rarely counter-hegemonic language-related discourses and language ideologies, on the other hand, are marginal and not easily detectable by either quantitative or qualitative methods. In short, in contemporary mainstream Serbian press, language-related discourses and language ideologies are predominantly discourses and ideologies of Serbian ethnonationalism, which, in the wake of the breakup of Yugoslavia, can be considered to be part of the Serbian nationalists’ “strategies of perpetuation” which they

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represent as an “attempt to maintain or reproduce a threatened national identity” (Wodak et al., 1999, p. 33). In reality, the contemporary Serbian ethnonationalist project has been an absurd quest at any cost for an anachronistic ideological chimera. The social effects of this project, including the deployment of the ideology of Serbian linguistic ethnonationalism, as is well known, have been aggressive, apoplectic wars against the Central South Slavs claimed as coethnics, barbaric war crimes including medieval-style siege, mass rape, and genocide, and apocalyptic social upheaval in Serbia as well as all around. The legacy of the Serbian ethnonationalist project also includes intractable, frozen conflicts, widespread counter-ethnonationalism among other Central South Slavs (for which they too bear responsibility, of course), political instability, socioeconomic stagnation and long-term poverty, and general societal misery and hopelessness. Similarly, the effect in the academic realm, in Serbia as well as the CSS area more broadly, has been the reduction of linguistics to a pseudoscience and an ideological handmaiden to the politics of ethnonationalism. So, where does this legacy leave the language (Central South Slavic), the nations that speak it (Bosniaks, Croats, Montenegrins, and Serbs), and the region (West Central Balkans)?

Notes 1. For a problematization of the concept of diglossia, see Herzfeld (2002). 2. In another example of continuity in Serbian nationalism, Hajdarpaši´c (2015) shows that the Serbian tradition of professionalizing nationalist activism goes back to the nineteenth century. 3. However, subsequent analyses of this data set using another multivariate technique, topic modeling (Ajši´c, 2020), as well as other studies (Jovanovi´c, 2018), reveal that the Serbian Orthodox Church is, in fact, a prominent actor in the public language-related discourse in Serbia. 4. German is the only language in this group which is comparable to the Central South Slavic in terms of polycentricity and the sociolinguistic situation. It should be noted, however, that the contestation of sovereignty of other German-speaking nations (i.e., Austria and, to a lesser extent, Switzerland) has historically been the provenance of the National Socialists, specifically, and the far right in the German-speaking world, more generally. 5. It should be noted that this intellectual genealogy is sometimes contested (see Piller, 2016; Schmidt, 1956). However, in addition to the parallel between Johann Gottfried Herder and Vuk Karadži´c noted above,

6

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

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according to Okey (2004, pp. 421–422), Ljudevit Gaj, the Croatian politician and publicist and pioneer of the unification of Central South Slavic, drew inspiration directly from Herder and quoted him extensively in his publications. It is important to note that it was the unification of Central South Slavic literature as a primary arena for the forging of a pan-Central South Slavic national consciousness (per the Romantic conception of nationalism) that was the main objective of the 1850 Vienna Literary Agreement (Greenberg, 2017/2018; Okey, 2004). This conceptualization too can be traced back to Herder (Bauman & Briggs, 2000). Ili´c (2014) contends that linguistic nationalism may not be embraced at the vernacular level (cf. practical consciousness), but her conclusion is based on a very limited convenience sample of 15 semi-structured interviews. On the other hand, she readily concedes that nationalist attitudes are, in fact, embraced at the vernacular level, while her findings and interpretations largely corroborate the relevant findings in the present study. This is a good example of the triangulation potential of the methodology laid out here (see Chapter 7 for a more detailed discussion). CDA theory holds that there are no ideology-free positions. Although as a Bosnian and a Bosniak I am a member of one of the ethnic groups party to the post-Yugoslav (language-ideological) contestation, I do not espouse any particular ideological agenda other than justice and interethnic reconciliation based on equality and fairness. For details on a similar issue in Ukraine, see Greenberg (2017/2018). In a comprehensive study of nationalism in popular Serbian literature from the critical period between 1985 and 1995, Žuni´c (2002) suggests that Serbian literary Romanticism played a formative role in the development of Serbian nationalism. Furthermore, he finds evidence of an instrumentalization of literature in the Serbian nationalist project around the breakup of Yugoslavia. Quite in line with the prevalent understanding of the role of literature in Serbian society (briefly exemplified in Sect. 6.4), some of the most prominent popular literary figures of this period whose works Žuni´c studied were or still are members of SANU (e.g., former President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and one of the authors of the SANU ´ c). Memorandum, Dobrica Cosi´ For a detailed discussion of the significance of Vuk Karadži´c’s work for Central South Slavic and South Slavic nationalism, see Hajdarpaši´c, 2015, esp. Chapter 1). Internal difficulties were sometimes compounded by attempts to undermine the Yugoslav Communist regime by the Serbian and Croatian post-WW2 pro-fascist diasporas. Ili´c (2014) points to the importance of a book by the law professor and prominent member of the Serbian diaspora in Switzerland, Lazo Kosti´c, titled Krad-a srpskog jezika ‘The theft of the

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Serbian language’ (Kosti´c, 2011), which appears to be the common reference for a lot of the contemporary discourse of contestation, particularly vis-à-vis the conflict with the Croats.

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Karadži´c, V. S. (2006 [1849]). Srbi svi i svuda [Serbs all and everywhere]. Kovˇceži´c za Istoriju, Jezik i Obiˇcaje Srba sva tri Zakona, 1. Dobrica knjiga. Kosti´c, L. (2011 [1964]). Krad-a srpskog jezika [The theft of the Serbian language]. Dobrica knjiga. Lindstedt, J., & Wahlström, M. (Eds.). (2012). Balkan encounters: Old and new identities in South-Eastern Europe. Slavica Helsingiensia, 41. Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki. Milroy, J. (2001). Language ideologies and the consequences of standardization. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 5(4), 530–555. Okey, R. (2004). Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian? Language and nationality in the lands of former Yugoslavia. East European Quarterly, 38(4), 419–441. Partington, A. (2010). Modern diachronic corpus-assisted discourse studies (MD-CADS) [Special Issue]. Corpora, 5(2). Piller, I. (2016). Herder: An explainer for linguists. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/herder-an-explainer-for-linguists/. Schmidt, R. J. (1956). Cultural nationalism in Herder. Journal of the History of Ideas, 17 (3), 407–417. Tollefson, J. W. (2002). The language debates: Preparing for war in Yugoslavia, 1980–1991. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 154(135), 65–82. Tomi´c, Y. (n.d.). The ideology of Greater Serbia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: An expert report. Bibliotheque de documentation internationale contemporaine, Universite de Paris X-Nanterre. http://www.helsinki.org.rs/ serbian/doc/expert%20report%20-%20yves%20tomic.pdf. Vikør, L. S. (2000). Northern Europe: Languages as prime markers of ethnic and national identity. In S. Barbour & C. Carmichael (Eds.), Language and nationalism in Europe (pp. 105–129). Oxford University Press. Voss, C. (2006). The Macedonian standard language: Tito-Yugoslav experiment or symbol of ‘Great Macedonian’ ethnic inclusion? In C. Mar-Molinero & P. Stevenson (Eds.), Language ideologies, policies and practices: Language and the future of Europe (pp. 118–132). Palgrave Macmillan. Williams, R. (1976). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. Oxford University Press. Wodak, R. (2018). Discourses about nationalism. In J. Flowerdew & E. Richardson (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of critical discourse studies (pp. 403–420). Routledge. Wodak, R., de Cillia, R., Reisigl, M., & Liebhart, K. (1999). The discursive construction of national identity. Edinburgh University Press. Woolard, K. A. (1998). Introduction: Language ideology as a field of inquiry. In B. B. Schieffelin, K. A. Woolard, & P. V. Kroskrity (Eds.), Language ideologies: Practice and theory (pp. 3–47). Oxford University Press.

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CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

Abstract The first part of the concluding chapter recaps the advantages of the three-step approach to identification of language-related discourses and language ideologies (thematic discourses > ideological discourses > language ideologies) and multivariate statistics demonstrated in this book. The second part, focusing on linguistic authority and linguistic ethnonationalism, summarizes the substantive findings, contextualizes them within existing theory on language ideology, and offers a tentative conclusion on the nature of mainstream public language-related discourse and language ideologies, as well as the relationship between dominant language ideologies and ethnonationalism in contemporary West Central Balkans. These are finally contextualized within the historical legacy of ethnolinguistic contestation as well as the current geopolitical situation and interethnic relations in the region. Keywords Three-step approach · Language-related discourse · Language ideology · Ethnonationalism · West Central Balkans

The research described in this book had two main goals. The first goal was to demonstrate the effectiveness of a novel methodological approach to the study of discourses and ideologies combining corpus linguistics

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Ajši´c, Language and Ethnonationalism in Contemporary West Central Balkans, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72177-0_7

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and multivariate statistics. The second goal was to identify any dominant language-related discourses and language ideologies extant in this corpus, and examine if and how they are linked to ethnonationalism. To this end, Chapters 3–5 outlined the proposed methodological approach including quantitative and qualitative results, while Chapter 6 offered a discussion and sociohistorical contextualization of the findings. In this final chapter, I want to provide, first, a recapitulation of my methodology to underscore its advantages, and second, a brief discussion of how these findings fit into the existing theory on discourse, language ideology, and nationalism, including some final thoughts on linguistic ethnonationalism in West Central Balkans.

7.1 The Advantages of Multivariate Statistics and the Three-Step Approach Because I was interested in a macro snapshot of the language-related discursive and ideological landscape, I initially opted for an as exhaustive a data set as possible. This meant the compilation of a comprehensive corpus comprising all articles in my target outlets that included any explicit references to language, resulting in a research corpus totaling 11,656,247 words from 16,148 articles (SERBCORP), and a similarly comprehensive reference (comparator) corpus of articles that did not mention language totaling 22,493,804 words from 37,227 articles (SERBCOMP). It is fairly obvious, however, that even with the help of powerful quantitative corpus linguistic tools it is difficult for an analyst to deal with this amount of data (roughly, 34 million words and 53 thousand articles altogether) in a principled manner. Studies using qualitative methodology don’t have this problem because they only take a limited number of relevant but researcher-selected texts into consideration, while studies using quantitative methodology have typically dealt with this problem by devising different, more or less principled, downsampling methods to produce more manageable data sets. Despite the obvious potential issues such as subjectivity or even bias in the selection of texts to study (i.e., cherry-picking) and the inevitable loss of information and questionable reliability resulting from most downsampling schemes, both types of studies, when vetted properly, typically produce more or less valid and valuable, if imperfect, results. I cite a number of such studies and use them to support or corroborate my own findings throughout the book. But the question I asked myself in designing this

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study was whether we could do better than that. In other words, would it be possible to construct a comprehensive or even exhaustive data set and then analyze it using a reliable, robust, and replicable methodology to produce demonstrably valid findings? The answer to that question, I think, is clearly yes. As I hope to have demonstrated in this book, the way to do this is to combine corpus linguistics with multivariate statistics such as exploratory factor analysis and cluster analysis. I began my analysis using traditional corpus linguistic techniques such as keyword and collocation analysis and found them useful enough to get at the contours of the discursive and ideological terrain in this corpus. Still, as I have explained in Chapter 4, in contrast to single-topic corpora, comprehensive, topically heterogeneous corpora such as this are more challenging to analyze simply because there are too many things going on which makes it difficult to know what is important and what analytical direction to take. What these preliminary results did tell me, however, is that articles with a more explicit focus on language (those that featured multiple references to language) were more likely to also feature references to CSS ethnonational identities and related concepts which are obviously important in terms of ethnonationalism and therefore worth pursuing analytically. Articles mentioning language five or more times were thus many times more likely to contain potentially relevant lexis than those mentioning language only once: the adjective ‘Croatian’ as a collocate of the search term ‘language’, for example, appeared at an average rate of 13 times per million words in articles mentioning language only once versus 324.5 times per million words in articles mentioning language five or more times. Put simply, rather than restrict myself to random samples of concordance lines, measures of individual collocates’ consistency over time, or limited time periods around important events as principled downsampling techniques, I created a new research corpus out of articles mentioning language five or more times as it represented, not merely a random sample, but a concentrated discourse considerably more focused on ethnolinguistic identity and ethnonationalism which was demonstrably more relevant to my research question. However, although this choice downsampled the research corpus from 11,656,247 words and 16,148 articles (SERBCORP) to 1,118,454 words and 1,257 articles (5+ SERBCORP, Table 3.1), and thus by more than a factor of ten, I was still looking at a sizeable topically heterogeneous research corpus. At this point, rather than focus analysis on a theoretically relevant but researcher-selected subset of lexical items resulting from concordance,

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keyword, and/or collocation analysis and their derivatives, as has often been done, I chose to conduct multivariate statistical analysis of collocate covariance. In simple terms, this meant aggregating and evaluating information on which collocates of the search term ‘language’ tended to appear together in which texts and which ones tended to appear in different texts. Based upon co-occurrence, exploratory factor analysis, the main multivariate technique applied here, suggested sets of lexical items (i.e., factors) which tended to appear in texts together. This is where the three-step approach comes into play. Although it is possible to bypass the first step (identification of ‘d’ thematic discourses indexed by factors) by restricting collocates to pre-modifying adjectives and attempt to read ideologies directly off the resulting factors, for example, this in my view is a mistake simply because ideologies are abstract whereas discourses are concrete. Put differently, discourses are material manifestations of ideologies and as such are complex lexical objects which are not necessarily limited to adjectives modifying a noun such as ‘language’. Consequently, if we do restrict collocates to premodifiers, we risk ending up with a severely truncated lexical set which is unlikely to accurately reflect a discourse, much less an ideology. Similarly, if we skip discourse analysis altogether and attempt to read ideologies off sets of nominal premodifiers alone, we risk producing a simplistic analysis at best and a misleading analysis at worst, devoid of any links between individual instances of language use, on the one hand, and social practices and structures, on the other, and therefore of any contextual information which is critical to the understanding of ideology. So, the first step in the analysis must be the identification of thematic discourses based upon covariance between textual collocates. Identifying thematic discourses, however, is insufficient because thematic discourses typically reflect the topical content of texts, i.e., what they are about, rather than any underlying ideologies, even if varying degrees of exceptions to this general rule are possible. (Factors 2 and 6 are considerably more ideologically transparent than the other factors in this solution, for instance.) This is where the second step in this three-step approach comes in. Although knowing the topical structure of a corpus suggested by thematic discourses is useful, to arrive at an understanding of its underlying ideological structure we must first identify the ideological discourses extant in it. This is a more complex process which cannot be automated but which can be considerably assisted by cluster analysis

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as it can suggest sets of factors based upon the degree of shared covariance between them. Where analysis of covariance suggests lexical sets that are sufficiently correlated to form a cluster, it is reasonable to expect that there might be ideological as well as thematic links between them. But even then, this may or may not be the case, and the only reliable way to identify any ideological content of factors and any underlying ideological structure of clusters is for the analyst to conduct a manual examination of representative texts. As it happens, this is another instance where multivariate analysis offers an advantage as it can identify texts representative of each factor, and therefore also cluster, automatically and reliably. Once we have completed this second step and identified any ideological discourses, we are ready to take the final, third step and conduct a principled, systematic qualitative analysis of representative texts to examine them for any identifiable ideologies, always being careful to contextualize any findings with respect to the thematic and ideological discourses identified in steps one and two. Note here that, while it may be possible to identify ideologies or elements of ideologies using any of the analytical techniques we have employed here at any step of the analysis, our findings are only valid if they are based on analysis of representative texts and are contextualized discursively. The first goal of this study, again, was to demonstrate the effectiveness of multivariate statistical techniques (here, exploratory factor analysis and cluster analysis) when applied to large, topically/discursively heterogeneous corpora, as well as to showcase a novel, three-step approach to identification of LRDs and LIs (thematic/‘d’ discourses > ideological/‘D’ discourses > LIs). The quantitative methods applied here have been shown to offer complementary angles from which to consider the data (e.g., keyword analysis proved useful for sampling purposes), which suggests that CL techniques are best used in conjunction with one another. The three-step approach has similarly been shown to be highly effective as discourse, as a material manifestation of ideology, cannot and should not be bypassed in analyses of ideologies. Further, it has been demonstrated that a combination of multivariate techniques and the three-step approach offers considerable advantages in identifying and, especially, validating LRD and LI constructs in topically heterogeneous corpora (although this requires further verification through application to other data sets). In contrast to other techniques (with a partial exception of TM, see Ajši´c, 2020), EFA effectively takes researcher inference out of the process of identification of both thematic

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discourses and representative texts, and thus provides a more principled, objective focus for follow-up analysis. This is especially important in areas where linguistic research has been traditionally politicized and biased. At the same time, it is clear that researcher inference is ultimately unavoidable as well as entirely necessary for any meaningful interpretations, as quantitative procedures can only identify salient lexical patterns and thematic rather than ideological discourses or ideologies. This study thus also reaffirms the necessity and effectiveness of a mixed-methods approach in discourse and ideology research. Finally, despite a very comprehensive data set and effort to triangulate the findings by employing multiple methodological and epistemological perspectives, the language-ideological profile presented here must be understood as tentative as manifestations of LRDs and LIs are not limited to lexis or the press, nor are they always metalinguistic. Consequently, both should be examined from multiple other perspectives using a variety of data sources and methodological approaches before any definitive conclusions can be reached. What this approach, with its comprehensiveness and robustness, does offer, however, is a reliable macro picture of the discursive and ideological terrain in focus and a baseline with which to compare and against which to interpret results obtained via other means. Let me briefly demonstrate how this baseline can be useful before discussing the theoretical fit of the findings here and offering some final thoughts on linguistic ethnonationalism in West Central Balkans. Long before COVID-19, West Central Balkans suffered a pandemic of virulent contestation of ethnolinguistic identity, with similarly devastating consequences, albeit with some hilarious results as well (see Coda below). And yet, despite the manifest absurdity of this enterprise and the intervening quarter-century since the war, the same discourses and ideologies continue to be promulgated by the same actors via the same institutional mechanisms as extreme ethnonationalism enjoys a revival in the Balkans amidst the current geostrategic instability induced by globalization, historic shift of power to the East, the rise of the farright movements and the erosion of democracy nearly everywhere, the corona virus pandemic, and climate change. For example, a full ten years after our data set ended and thus comparatively recently, Dr. Aleksandar Milanovi´c, a professor in the School of Philology at the University of Belgrade, authored a Politika article titled “Vuk’s Serbs, all and everywhere” (Milanovi´c, 2017). In it, we find the same, tired references to Vuk Karadži´c and Romantic nationalism:

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According to Vuk, the criterion which united the members of all three faiths was the Štokavian dialect, i.e., the Serbian language. And not only according to Vuk. Led by Humboldt’s inspirational ideas, the entire European Romanticism accepted as foundational the idea that all spiritual and material culture of a people is realized through language, i.e., that language is the most significant characteristic of a people and its most intimate means of expression, as well as the idea that one people as a rule speaks one language.

the same, tired discourses of endangerment and contestation: At a time of the birth of new nations and new political languages out of the Serbian ethnic and linguistic corpus, processes which may yet be neither halted nor complete, we must return to the grand days when the Serbian nation was being created to analyze the criteria on which that process rested.

and the same, tired Herderian, Romantic language ideology, including the same, tired pseudoscientific argumentation (even if there is also evidence here of a nascent alternative discourse which begins to square with reality): Obviously, he used the linguistic criterion which suggests that the boundaries between peoples really are boundaries between languages, rejecting simultaneously the religious criterion as irrelevant to this classification. The further development of thought in the humanities and social sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century and especially in the twentieth caused a change in the criteria for the delineation of peoples and nations: the religious criterion replaced the linguistic so that today we speak of Serbs, i.e., Eastern Orthodox Christians, Croats, i.e., Catholics, and Bosniaks, i.e., Muslims.

I have chosen this particular example to discuss here because of its recency, but also because it so well encapsulates the discourses, ideologies, and the pseudoscientific argumentation identified in this study even though it was not included in the data set. Now, where in the absence of a robust and replicable methodology I might be accused of cherrypicking a particular text such as this one because it suits my analytical preferences or ideological biases, the macro discursive and ideological baseline established above makes it quite clear that this is not the case. And this, of course, is not the only such example in recent public and

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academic language-related discourses in Serbia1 ; they are, quite unfortunately, rather plentiful and they have led other researchers to draw very similar conclusions (cf. Ili´c, 2014; Jovanovi´c, 2018). The findings resulting from this approach, as can be seen, make it possible to easily and quickly understand as well as convincingly contextualize individual pieces of discourse within the broader, empirically attested discursive and ideological landscape of their originating society.

7.2 Linguistic Authority and Ethnonationalism in West Central Balkans At the end of the concluding chapter to this book, I want to situate the analysis and findings vis-à-vis theory relevant to discourse, language ideology, and nationalism, and offer an explanation of the paradoxical vitality of ethnolinguistic nationalism in West Central Balkans generally, and in Serbia in particular. Let us remind ourselves of the conceptualization of language ideology adopted in this book. Following Irvine (1989, p. 255), language ideologies are understood as “the cultural system[s] of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests.” More specifically, “language ideologies represent the perception of language and discourse that is constructed in the interest of a specific social or cultural group” (Kroskrity, 2000b, p. 8) and “often demonstrably tied to their political economic interests” (Kroskrity, 2015, p. 98). It should be clear from these definitions, as well as the discussion so far in this book, what language ideologies are: politically-interested ways of thinking about language. But what makes them important to understand and how can that knowledge be socially useful? This book is theoretically and methodologically rooted in two distinct research traditions: corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. Whereas corpus linguistics, generally speaking, does not make any sociopolitically relevant ideological commitments, at least not explicitly and in a way that has much broader societal significance, critical discourse analysis very much does. CDA relies on linguistic and semiotic analysis of discourse to uncover and expose the power structures behind various forms of social inequality with the explicitly political aim of raising awareness about the ideological workings of language and challenging social domination and hegemony. To achieve this, it connects micro-level analysis of linguistic features and co-text (in individual texts) with macro-level

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analysis of social practices and structures (i.e., sociopolitical context), via intermediate analysis involving intertextuality and interdiscursivity (in multiple texts and cross-textual discursive practices), as I have done in Chapters 3–6. I started this research with the premise that the importance of language, and specifically discourse, as an ideological tool to achieve hegemonic power has been growing. The recent historical developments have only confirmed this as “language continues to be a potent political weapon” and “is part and parcel of the political economic and historical forces that structure everyday life” (Cavanaugh, 2020). Analysis of discourse and ideology in this tradition can thus help us understand important issues that have significance for our daily lives such as political correctness and hate speech, racial and ethnic relations, immigration, extremist politics, the credibility of public officials, and challenges to the authority of institutions such as science, higher education, and the media. In the specific case of West Central Balkans, the focus has been on the links between language and ethnonationalism, but the analysis has inevitably touched upon most of these issues. To summarize the findings briefly, we have seen that a significant portion of public language-related discourse in Serbia (as well as West Central Balkans) is focused on the symbolic/affective function of language, i.e., its capacity to encode and signal ethnolinguistic identity. Discussions of language were shown to be anchored in two dominant ideological discourses, discourses of endangerment and contestation, both undergirded by specific pseudoscientific argumentation. In the simplest of terms, language is represented as a key issue in the context of an ostensible threat to ethnonational identity, which is then defended via systematic discursive attacks against the ostensible enemies couched in terms suggesting a legitimate scientific debate. Further, two dominant language ideologies were shown to underlie this discursive formation, a monoglot standard language ideology and an ideology proclaiming language to be the essence of ethnonational identity. So, how do our findings square with existing theory of language ideology and ethnonationalism? Is this discursive-ideological complex borne out by what we know about language ideologies from research conducted in other contexts? As has been shown, at a very general level the semiotic patterns empirically attested in this study are instances of ‘(indirect) indexicality’, or “conventional/stereotypical relationships between linguistic forms and social meanings” (Jaffe, 2016; cf. Woolard, 2020). More specifically, I

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have suggested multiple instances of concepts belonging to the theoretical framework of linguistic differentiation, i.e., “similarities in the ways ideologies ‘recognize’ or misrecognize linguistic differences: how they locate, interpret, and rationalize sociolinguistic complexity, identifying linguistic varieties with ‘typical’ persons and activities and accounting for the differentiations among them” (Irvine & Gal, 2000, p. 36). Specifically, this framework identifies three processes by which differentiation works: iconization/rhematization, fractal recursivity, and erasure. Iconization refers to the mapping of linguistic features onto social images, positing a direct link between one or more linguistic features (e.g., Cyrillic script) and (an essentialist conceptualization of) the nature of the persons or social groups who display them (e.g., Serbian as an authentic ethnolinguistic identity). Fractal recursivity involves the projection of binary oppositions (e.g., absence/presence of linguistic distinction or separate language name) from one level of relationship to another (e.g., from local to national to global). Erasure refers to the simplification of a sociolinguistic field through which some persons, social groups, or sociolinguistic phenomena are rendered invisible in ideologically and politically convenient ways (e.g., implicit marginalization of non-standard varieties, or relegation of rival ethnolinguistic identities to a regional or local level). Based upon this, it seems reasonable to conclude that the findings accord well with the theory of indexicality and linguistic differentiation, even if my use of it is a partial appropriation and its manifestations here often seem somewhat different from those that served as the basis for the theory’s articulation (cf. examples in Woolard, 2020; application in Greenberg, 2017/2018 seems closer to mine). It would be interesting to consider if and to what extent existing theory should be amended based upon its fit with the patterns attested here, but that is outside of the scope of the present study. I have further demonstrated the centrality of homogeneism, a belief in the “impossibility of heterogeneous communities and the naturalness of homogeneous communities” (Blommaert & Verschueren, 1998, p. 207; cf. ‘traditionalist discourse’, Busch, 2010), as well as pointed to Enlightenment (Locke) and Romantic (Herder) language philosophy, particularly with respect to their roles in the national revival in the German-speaking world (Fichte). In addition to the homogeneism, which is common to both, Baumann and Briggs (2000), in their comparative analysis of the language philosophy of John Locke and Johann Gottfried Herder, point to a multiplicity of binary differences between them which

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reflect broader differences between the Enlightenment and Romanticism such as modernism vs. primordialism, society vs. nature, science vs. emotion, rationality vs. irrationality, universality vs. particularism, and so on. Consider, again, the characteristically paradoxical commitments here (by Serbian as well as other ethnolinguistic nationalisms, cf. ‘three paradoxes of nationalism’, Anderson, 2016; see also Lindstedt, 2016): nationalism, a modern project, resting on a pre-modern primordial ethnic identity; standardized monolingualism, a modern project, resting on a pre-modern literature; scientific argumentation, a modern project, resting on a historical myth, etc. Perhaps the best way to understand these contradictions is the theoretical position that bridges primordialism and modernity known as perennialism, and the version of perennialism advanced by Joshua Fishman, in particular (Fishman, 1972; see also Haque, 2015). In this account, language and nationalism are linked via both primordialism and modernity as the nation seeks both deeper authenticity and modern forms of sociocultural and political organization. To a large extent, then, the discursive-ideological complex of Serbian ethnonationalism (but also the ethnonationalism of other CSS groups) is about the construction and legitimation of linguistic authority (Woolard, 2016), another major theoretical concept in the theory of language ideology. Linguistic authority “encompass[es] both the authority of specific linguistic varieties [e.g., the monoglot standard] and the linguistic construction of political and social authority [e.g., legitimate ethnolinguistic identity]” (Woolard, 2020). Linguistic authority rests on two contrasting but complementary language ideologies, anonymity and authenticity, which, similar to what we have seen above, derive from the Enlightenment and Romanticism, respectively. Anonymity harkens back to Locke and the idea of language as a transparent medium of disinterested (i.e., scientific) observation of universal truths, whereas authenticity encapsulates Herder’s conceptualization of language as the soul of the people and the voice of specific cultural experience seamlessly connecting the past and present. As we can see, this takes us back to modernism and primordialism and Fishman’s perennialism as a bridge between the two and a theoretical explanation for the paradox that is contemporary ethnonationalism in West Central Balkans but also Eastern Europe more generally (Kamusella, 2018). Finally, anonymity and authenticity “are allied in Western traditions with an ideology of linguistic naturalism, which marginalizes historicity and human agency in favor of a vision of all

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language as ‘natural’ and above the human will” (Woolard, 2020, p. 13). We shall come back to this last point. Throughout this book, I have emphasized that the results of even the most robust quantitative methods ultimately depend on various forms of contextualization for accurate interpretation and understanding. This is true for all corpus linguistic research and even more so for research conducted within the framework of critical discourse analysis. Put simply, discourse analysis must be situated in ethnographic and sociopolitical context (Roth-Gordon, 2020). I have tried to do so in a variety of ways, particularly in Chapter 6, but let me invoke one final relevant theoretical concept here, which will help us not only situate this research with respect to relevant theory and understand Serbian linguistic ethnonationalism better, but also conclude the discussion in a fitting way. Woolard (2020) suggests that the Bakhtinian concept of ‘chronotope’ (space-time) is closely-related to the ideology of linguistic differentiation. Similarly, in her discussion of ethnographic approaches to discourse based on the work of Erving Goffman and Mikhail Bakhtin, Roth-Gordon (2020) points to a chronotope’s ability to create linguistic and social differentiation. Her synthetic account of chronotope is worth quoting here at some length (Roth-Gordon, 2020, pp. 46–47). Chronotopes “draw on space and time as closely related social constructs that similarly shape how people speak and situate themselves in the world.” They are “temporal epochs and qualities mapped into geography, and geographic locations mapped into time” as well as “invokable chunks of history that organize the indexical order of discourse”. In addition, “[t]hrough chronotopes, speakers bring the past or the future into the here and now, mobilizing participants to align with or distance themselves from the personae associated with these ‘temporal and spatial imaginaries’.” The centrality for Serbian linguistic ethnonationalism of the Romantic nationalism of Herder and Fichte, and specifically Vuk Karadži´c and his mid-nineteenth-century pamphlet on Central South Slavic ethnolinguistic identity (Karadži´c, 2006), point to the existence of a mythical chronotope of an age of innocence at the dawn of South Slavic national revival in a Balkans finally liberating itself from oppressive, centuries-long dual colonial yoke of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, when all Southern Slavs were still true to their ethnic Serbian origins and before their different religious identities intruded into the processes of national liberation and unification to produce separate ethnonational identities and, in time, their “political” languages (as opposed to the “natural”, Serbian

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one, cf. ‘naturalism’ above). Consistent with the ideological continuity in Serbian nationalism between the formative period of Serbian nationhood at the beginning of the nineteenth century and now (Biserko, 2012), this chronotope continually evokes and invokes the glory days of the struggle for national liberation, rife with possibilities and promising not only the long-awaited freedom but also the nullification of the colonial legacy, a reversal of historical fortunes, and ultimately, geopolitical gains and influence. The twentieth-century Slavic Balkans, by contrast, is a historical landscape of dramatic reversals of fortune for the Serbian nation itself, swinging from catastrophe to victory in WWI, to the post-WWI formation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and then the first Yugoslavia, to genocide and Yugoslavia’s demise and then rebirth as a Socialist federation in WWII, and, later, transformation into a leading non-aligned Cold War nation, to its final death in the welter of the 1990s Yugoslav wars. And yet, this chronotope, in a more circumspect way, is also an expression of nostalgia for not only the golden age of national revival in the nineteenth century (cf. Wodak, 2018) but also the palpable privilege of domination over Yugoslavia of the twentieth, now not only revoked but made worse by the ascendancy of other Central South Slavs as equals, adding insult to injury. Given that all Central South Slavic ethnic nations have by now attained sovereignty, one might wonder what purpose continued Serbian (linguistic) ethnonationalism could possibly serve. As the writer, member of SANU, and statesman (and, many would add, nationalist ideologue), ´ c, has said, Serbs had two purposes for Yugoslavia: to unify, Dobrica Cosi´ in one state, all Southern Slavs as well as to unify all Serbs. Southern Slavic unity being no more, Serbian unity is all that remains. However, if we recall the nineteenth-century Serbian nationalist project aiming to create a Greater Serbia and bring all Serbs together in one state, it becomes clear that for Serbian nationalists the unification of Southern Slavs was a means to an end all along. That means to an end, Yugoslavia as Greater Serbia in all but name, may have ceased to exist, but Serbian ethnonationalism is alive and well and continues to evolve, while Serbian nationalists continue to dream. The continued Serbian (linguistic) ethnonationalism thus has several purposes. Given the considerable Serbian historical trauma which involves centuries-long colonial occupation, the loss of a third of the population in WWI, and genocide in WWII, it seems reasonable to presume that the discourse of Serbian ethnonationalism is a ‘rhetoric of distress’ (Stewart, 1991, cited in Bauman & Briggs, 2000), a response

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to trauma functioning as a coping strategy, and a kind of ‘constructed certitude’ and ‘counter- or anti-modernity’ serving as a counterweight to the uncertainties of the fragmentation (rasparˇcavanje) of post-Yugoslav geopolitics and postmodernism (cf. Benwell & Stokoe, 2006). Nevertheless, here too, much like in the United States during the Trump era, we also see a trauma of the loss of privilege and the seemingly irrational anger as a response. It also seems clear that, in the Balkans, ethnonationalist chauvinism is the sole political project of the elites, a frightfully effective ideological mechanism to maintain status and privilege acquired through questionable dealings during the war or the postwar transition to market economy, which forces individuals “to align with or distance themselves from” the new political order and thus either give their consent and be ˇ implicated or be socially marginalized (cf. Colovi´ c, 2004). In this, the elites are joined by enterprising individuals and groups who drum up ethnonationalist sentiment for a living, as a kind of profession or business, a cultural cottage industry as it were (i.e., Srbovanje ‘being a professional Serb’). But more than anything, the often-absurd manifestations of Serbian (and, to a lesser extent, others’) linguistic ethnonationalism continue to serve as a tool for the mobilization of popular support for a perennial, feigned national revival (cf. Lindstedt & Wahlström, 2012) and the preservation of ethnonational identity whose historical narrative is questionable at best. In the Serbian case, this is really code for the resurgent nationalism’s renewed attempts at expansionism and reattainment of regional hegemony (think: ‘Make Serbia Great Again!’), as can be seen from persistent Serbian meddling in Bosnia and Herzegovina and, increasingly, in Montenegro. Predictably, this is met with thriving counter-nationalisms among the Bosniaks, Croats, and Montenegrins and the cycle continues.

Note 1. In the interests of fairness, it should be noted that even though Serbian ethnonationalism has been the driving force behind the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and the continuing climate of contestation and conflict in West Central Balkans, other Central South Slavic groups are not immune from manifestations of ethnonationalism. The intensity of ethnonationalism varies among groups and seems to be more or less directly proportional to a group’s size and the amount of regional power it wields, i.e., the larger and more powerful the group, the more intense its ethnonationalism.

7

CONCLUSION

157

References Primary Reference Milanovi´c, A. (2017, February 13). Vukovi Srbi, svi i svuda [Vuk’s Serbs, all and everywhere]. Politika. http://www.politika.rs/sr/clanak/374117/Drustvo/ Vukovi-Srbi-svi-i-svuda.

Secondary References Ajši´c, A. (2020, May). Large-scale lexical patterns in discourse as indicators of ideologies: Comparing exploratory factor analysis and topic modeling. Paper presented at ICAME 41 (Language and Linguistics in a Complex World: Data, Interdisciplinarity, Transfer, and the Next Generation), Heidelberg, Germany. Anderson, B. (2016 [1983]). Imagined communities (Rev. ed.). Verso. Bauman, R., & Briggs, C. L. (2000). Language philosophy as language ideology: John Locke and Johann Gottfried Herder. In P. V. Kroskrity (Ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities (pp. 139–204). School of American Research Press. Benwell, B., & Stokoe, E. (2006). Discourse and identity. Edinburgh University Press. Biserko, S. (2012). Yugoslavia’s implosion: The fatal attraction of Serbian nationalism. Belgrade: The Norwegian Helsinki Committee. http://www.helsinki. org.rs/doc/yugoslavias%20implosion.pdf. Blommaert, J., & Verschueren, J. (1998). The role of language in European nationalist ideologies. In B. B. Schieffelin, K. A. Woolard, & P. V. Kroskrity (Eds.), Language ideologies: Practice and theory (pp. 189–210). Oxford University Press. Busch, B. (2010). New national languages in Eastern Europe. In N. Coupland (Ed.), The handbook of language and globalization (pp. 205–223). Wiley-Blackwell. Cavanaugh, J. R. (2020). Language ideology revisited. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 263, 51–57. https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-20202082. ˇ Colovi´ c, I. (2004). Priests of language: The nation, poetry, and the cult of language. In R. Bugarski & C. Hawkesworth (Eds.), Language in the former Yugoslav lands (pp. 295–304). Slavica Publishers. Fishman, J. A. (1972). Language and nationalism. New Berry House Publishers. Greenberg, R. (2017/2018). When is language a language? The case of former Yugoslavia. Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 35(1–4), 431–442. Haque, E. (2015). Language and nationalism. In N. Bonvillain (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of linguistic anthropology (pp. 317–328). Routledge.

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Ili´c, M. (2014). Collective narrative: The narrative on Croatian language from academic to far-right discourses in Serbia. Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology, 1, 49–73. Irvine, J. T. (1989). When talk isn’t cheap: Language and political economy. American Ethnologist, 16(2), 248–267. Irvine, J. T., & Gal, S. (2000). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In P. V. Kroskrity (Ed.), Language regimes: Ideologies, polities, and identities (pp. 35–83). School of American Research Press. Jaffe, A. (2016). Indexicality, stance and fields in sociolinguistics. In N. Coupland (Ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical debates (pp. 86–112). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107449787.005. Jovanovi´c, S. M. (2018). Assertive discourse and folk linguistics: Serbian nationalist discourse about the Cyrillic script in the 21st century. Language Policy, 17, 611–631. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-018-9478-2. Kamusella, T. D. (2018). Nationalism and national languages. In J. W. Tollefson & M. Pérez-Milans (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language policy and planning (pp. 163–182). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxf ordhb/9780190458898.013.8. Karadži´c, V. S. (2006 [1849]). Srbi svi i svuda [Serbs all and everywhere]. Kovˇceži´c za Istoriju, Jezik i Obiˇcaje Srba sva tri Zakona, 1. Dobrica knjiga. Kroskrity, P. V. (Ed.). (2000b). Language regimes: Ideologies, polities, and identities. School of American Research Press. Kroskrity, P. V. (2015). Language ideologies: Emergence, elaboration, and application. In N. Bonvillain (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of linguistic anthropology (1st ed., pp. 95–108). Routledge. Lindstedt, J. (2016). Conflicting nationalist discourses in the Balkan Slavic language area. In T. Kamusella, M. Nomachi, & C. Gibson (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of Slavic languages, identities and borders (pp. 429–447). Palgrave Macmillan. Lindstedt, J., & Wahlström, M. (Eds.). (2012). Balkan encounters: Old and new identities in South-Eastern Europe. Slavica Helsingiensia, 41. Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki. Roth-Gordon, J. (2020). Situating discourse analysis in ethnographic and sociopolitical context. In A. De Fina & A. Georgakopoulou (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of discourse studies (pp. 32–51). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108348195.003. Wodak, R. (2018). Discourses about nationalism. In J. Flowerdew & E. Richardson (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of critical discourse studies (pp. 403–420). Routledge. Woolard, K. A. (2016). Singular and plural: Ideologies of linguistics authority in 21st century Catalonia. Oxford University Press. Woolard, K. A. (2020). Language ideology. In J. Stanlaw (Ed.), The international encyclopedia of linguistic anthropology. https://doi.org/10.1002/978111878 6093.iela0217.

CHAPTER 8

Coda: Big Data vs. Small Minds

Abstract The coda uses references to popular culture in West Central Balkans to contextualize the findings and offers a brief discussion of the research with respect to its potential impact on the pervasive climate of contestation in contemporary Balkans and the deployment of biased academic and professional discourses on language. The discussion considers the potential ways to counteract the anachronistic and retrograde ideological orientation towards language and nationalism, suggesting big data and advanced analytical techniques as a way to enforce high standards in academic research but also elevate public discourse, and potentially contribute to the creation of a discourse climate more favorable to constructive engagement between social groups whose political interests do not always align neatly. Keywords Bias · Pseudoscientific argumentation · Big data

In 1991, the year the Yugoslav wars broke out, the most famous Yugoslav comedy troupe, the Sarajevo-based Surrealists, came out with a skit about language, a prophetic reductio ad absurdum satire of future, post-Yugoslav language policy (Top Lista Nadrealista, 1991). In the skit, a linguistics professor from the Institute for Language, Literature, Small Business and Telecommunications based in a small town in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Ajši´c, Language and Ethnonationalism in Contemporary West Central Balkans, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72177-0_8

159

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southeast Bosnia announces on national TV that his research team had made an epochal scientific discovery: the language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian is really not one language but six: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Herzegovinian, Montean and Negrin (from Montenegro). To illustrate, he reads a simple sentence (Ja cˇitam. ‘I read.’) aloud in all six languages, Monty Python-style: Ja cˇitam. Ja cˇitam. Ja cˇitam. Ja cˇitam. Ja cˇitam. Ja cˇitam. In a follow-up field report, everyday communication is facilitated by “interpreters” and the skit ends with a home shopping channel-style ad for a one-volume, six-way dictionary “ideal for [use in] mixed marriages”. The prophetic nature of the skit will be fairly obvious: as has been noted, in the years since the wars ended Serbian films have been screened with subtitles in Croatian, ballots in Bosnian elections have been printed in three nearly-identical versions, and Serbian-to-Bosnian interpretation has been requested in Serbian courts. (As I’m finishing writing in early February 2021, Croatian state television [HRT] broadcast, matter-offactly, a story about a 17-year-old Serbian girl who, upon returning with her family to Croatia, “managed to learn Croatian in only three years” [Škovrlj, 2021].) Ditto the skit’s use of pseudoscientific argumentation (cf. Topos 1 and 2): much like the linguists in our data set, the linguistics professor in the skit frames what is primarily an administrative and political issue (the name for the standardized official language)1 as a scientific one, proceeding to offer absurd and demonstrably false claims in lieu of scientific evidence. Not only has “the power of language [in West Central Balkans] at times reached absurd proportions” as Greenberg (2004/2008, p. 159) has noted, but Central South Slavs have endured thirty years of a veritable (linguistic) Absurdistan, to borrow the indicative title of a recent album by the regionally popular, socially engaged Bosnian band, Dubioza Kolektiv (‘The Dubious Collective’). Given how prophetic the Surrealists’ skit above has been in other respects as well, e.g., the degradation of academic authority and public and media discourses, crass and manipulative commercialization of culture in the pursuit of neoliberal ideology, and the resulting societal apathy (to which can be added the ongoing mass exodus of young people from West Central Balkans to Western Europe in search of opportunity), to expect linguistic ethnonationalism to subside any time soon seems hopelessly optimistic regardless of how absurd it ultimately really is (cf. Kamusella, 2018), not least because many academic linguists and other propagators of the domiˇ nant language-related discourses and language ideologies, whom Colovi´ c

8

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161

(2004) has called “priests of language”, remain as biased and unethical and their offerings as pseudoscientific now as they were when Greenberg made the observation back in 2004 (but see Busch, 2010). Nevertheless, linguists can be instrumental in sociopolitical debates (Tollefson, 2002), and so we can and should endeavor to produce fair and ethical research and develop ever more robust, replicable research methodology to use as an antidote to the longstanding epidemic of pseudoscience and linguistic ethnonationalism (cf. Lindstedt, 2016). In the case of discourse and ideology research based on large corpora, we can call this drive big data vs. small minds.

Note 1. Apparently quoting an unnamed friend, the linguist Max Weinreich used to say that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. See also Greenberg (2017/2018).

References Busch, B. (2010). New national languages in Eastern Europe. In N. Coupland (Ed.), The handbook of language and globalization (pp. 205–223). Wiley-Blackwell. ˇ Colovi´ c, I. (2004). Priests of language: The nation, poetry, and the cult of language. In R. Bugarski & C. Hawkesworth (Eds.), Language in the former Yugoslav lands (pp. 295–304). Slavica Publishers. Greenberg, R. D. (2004/2008). Language and identity in the Balkans: SerboCroatian and its disintegration (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Greenberg, R. D. (2017/2018). When is language a language? The case of former Yugoslavia. Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 35(1–4), 431–442. Kamusella, T. D. (2018). Nationalism and national languages. In J. W. Tollefson & M. Pérez-Milans (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language policy and planning (pp. 163–182). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxf ordhb/9780190458898.013.8. Lindstedt, J. (2016). Conflicting nationalist discourses in the Balkan Slavic language area. In T. Kamusella, M. Nomachi, & C. Gibson (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of Slavic languages, identities and borders (pp. 429–447). Palgrave Macmillan. Škovrlj, E. (2021, February 3). Tea - vrsna jezikoslovka iz Karina [Tea—A stand-out linguist from Karin] [Video file]. https://vijesti.hrt.hr/hrvatska/ tea-vrsna-jezikoslovka-iz-0-429597.

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Tollefson, J. W. (2002). The language debates: Preparing for war in Yugoslavia, 1980–1991. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 154(135), 65–82. Top Lista Nadrealista. (1991). Otvoreno o jeziku [An open conversation about language] [Video file]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DztrX5dXmxU.

Appendices

Appendix A See Table A.1. Table A.1 Positive Key Lemmas in 5+ SERBCORP (by Keyness Score) N

Keyword

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

language Serbian linguistic dictionary school mother (adj.) script Cyrillic word instruction learn Montenegrin English linguist professor literature

Freq.

%

Texts

RC. Freq.

RC. %

Keyness

P

12530 7309 901 801 2593 611 1243 590 2633 710 825 696 1220 260 1524 1305

1.12 0.65 0.08 0.07 0.23 0.05 0.11 0.05 0.24 0.06 0.07 0.06 0.11 0.02 0.14 0.12

1118 670 112 135 237 197 169 74 502 107 70 106 271 81 307 269

21304 28440 792 783 10392 649 3424 905 12494 1467 2015 1452 4033 96 5987 4765

0.20 0.27

18516.54 3799.77 2043.82 1717.42 1269.04 1249.68 1108.27 942.80 879.24 875.24 851.36 849.83 839.02 823.13 775.36 760.37

0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000

0.10 0.03 0.12 0.01 0.02 0.01 0.04 0.06 0.05

(continued)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Ajši´c, Language and Ethnonationalism in Contemporary West Central Balkans, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72177-0

163

164

APPENDICES

Table A.1 (continued) N

Keyword

17 18 19 20 21

subject Croatian use (n.) Serbo-Croatian education (profession) education grade literary people Bosniak learning foreign Bosnian students (K-12) elementary national Vuk (Karadži´c) culture speech speak minority translator Croats science Serbs translation class period Montenegrins doctor second expression meaning school (university) label wrote German Spanish

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Freq.

%

Texts

RC. Freq.

RC. %

770 684 585 226 563

0.07 0.06 0.05 0.02 0.05

147 163 72 70 219

1997 1623 1249 142 1388

0.02 0.02 0.01

893 609 1027 1510 223 352 2004 266 637

0.08 0.05 0.09 0.13 0.02 0.03 0.18 0.02 0.06

187 87 128 234 70 129 265 64 120

3078 1672 3959 7019 181 627 10904 383 2163

0.03 0.02 0.04 0.07

870 1361 482 1485 487 1764 491 395 315 668 1432 478 542 213 843 3666 310 262 995

0.08 0.12 0.04 0.13 0.04 0.16 0.04 0.04 0.03 0.06 0.13 0.04 0.05 0.02 0.08 0.33 0.03 0.02 0.09

87 88 103 230 111 90 111 102 117 189 250 111 63 62 314 534 103 79 89

3686 6963 1540 8098 1685 10282 1758 1249 929 3063 8442 1998 2441 564 4519 26947 1128 867 5774

0.03 0.07 0.01 0.08 0.02 0.10 0.02 0.01

442 1012 460 201

0.04 0.09 0.04 0.02

119 76 123 63

1995 6015 2186 630

0.01

0.10 0.02

0.03 0.08 0.02 0.02 0.04 0.26 0.01 0.05 0.02 0.06 0.02

Keyness

P

740.22 729.29 697.87 597.25 574.70

0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000

574.07 545.16 541.68 530.86 526.18 497.70 449.44 445.70 419.59

0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000

378.99 369.42 349.22 330.50 311.04 309.94 295.94 290.68 256.25 242.74 240.77 214.29 205.62 199.56 198.29 187.05 181.64 179.80 177.70

0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000

166.80 164.69 152.83 149.85

0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000

(continued)

165

APPENDICES

Table A.1 (continued) N

Keyword

Freq.

%

Texts

RC. Freq.

RC. %

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

exam SANU name identity children knowledge scientific French Russian poetry introduction percent writer Monte(negro) understand be able to (Monte)negro academician cultural example nation Vojvodina sentence today letters (a, b, c…) students (K-8) same poet schooling program/ curriculum difference book century parents history change (v.) law

305 235 943 331 1294 542 255 477 525 543 185 816 998 1072 287 4619 971 210 655 571 305 171 153 1306 100

0.03 0.02 0.08 0.03 0.12 0.05 0.02 0.04 0.05 0.05 0.02 0.07 0.09 0.10 0.03 0.41 0.09 0.02 0.06 0.05 0.03 0.02 0.01 0.12

63 84 252 94 220 123 65 140 106 63 74 193 182 93 62 186 86 74 95 342 66 72 64 567 72

1222 827 5684 1400 8371 2813 1005 2466 2827 2988 645 5022 6480 7178 1339 37405 6503 900 4147 3576 1622 740 640 9616 344

0.01

262 1104 402 160 931

0.02 0.10 0.04 0.01 0.08

110 171 89 62 161

1426 8156 2505 769 6780

0.01 0.08 0.02

419 2499 855 314 848 138 687

0.04 0.22 0.08 0.03 0.08 0.01 0.06

101 371 72 106 125 107 112

2665 20214 6192 1893 6142 674 5002

0.03 0.19 0.06 0.02 0.06

79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

0.05 0.01 0.08 0.03 0.02 0.03 0.03 0.05 0.06 0.07 0.01 0.35 0.06 0.04 0.03 0.02

0.09

0.06

0.05

Keyness

P

149.17 145.87 144.97 144.68 144.52 140.91 128.83 125.47 121.69 117.18 116.65 114.84 109.40 99.97 99.90 90.76 90.45 89.19 81.12 74.36 73.55 71.08 68.47 65.65 64.47

0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000

58.63 54.05 53.54 51.61 50.85

0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000

50.77 49.74 48.64 48.21 48.20 42.65 37.58

0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000 0.0000000000

166

APPENDICES

Appendix B See Table B.1. Table B.1 Lemma Collocates of the Lemma jezik ‘Language’ in 5+ SERBCORP (by Frequency) N

Collocate

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Serbian foreign that English mother (adj.) own speak second itself script literature one all our Croatian Montenegrin learn (v.) literary school (K-12) they official use (n.) this instruction new word people year professor culture national first learning

MI score

Texts

Total

8.80 13.02 7.64 12.63 8.86 7.70 10.26 11.05 5.11 9.19 7.58 6.22 8.24 8.91 8.10 12.77 9.51 9.16 6.97 5.86 14.15 9.35 6.53 8.30 10.26 5.86 7.09 5.36 8.14 8.74 8.64 6.08 7.28

802 346 484 323 296 360 321 307 338 165 220 281 290 257 157 112 175 176 179 245 107 136 211 149 172 180 153 186 145 153 126 154 136

3449 1011 791 693 636 608 552 507 494 457 456 454 406 401 363 351 340 335 318 310 285 274 265 262 254 253 252 239 239 231 222 222 222

(continued)

APPENDICES

Table B.1

(continued)

N

Collocate

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

French his name two Russian say Serbo-Croatian German subject book their question Bosnian written exists know dictionary he same name world (n.) Serbia Monte(negro) people’s elementary Serbs Cyrillic (n.) mathematics Roma (Monte)negro history part minority knowledge country curriculum school (university) standardization Bosniak

71 72

167

MI score

Texts

Total

11.78 7.45 10.61 5.72 7.98 9.73 8.76 7.66 11.06 5.41 7.48 5.88 9.30 11.83 9.38 9.44 6.66 5.39 7.39 7.72 6.43 6.54 8.92 11.67 9.64 5.74 7.61 9.29 8.49 7.75 7.43 5.62 7.89 8.76 7.03 7.89 7.22

115 165 96 138 89 152 96 112 103 118 135 108 54 119 126 122 77 133 112 89 112 109 80 76 107 86 70 68 34 81 97 95 64 90 86 85 86

215 213 208 206 202 187 182 177 170 169 168 168 165 163 161 159 158 156 154 151 150 148 144 143 138 138 135 135 135 134 134 129 128 124 122 121 120

10.72 7.75

56 54

117 116

(continued)

168

APPENDICES

Table B.1

(continued)

N

Collocate

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

children every official institute little big man Hungarian that is contemporary grade Slovene science instructor Spanish renaming that special introduction department orthography student (university) board number class period linguistic begin different common good rights standard (adj.) state dialect many learn (v.) call cultural Albanian

95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111

MI score

Texts

Total

7.21 6.34 10.91 8.02 7.28 5.85 6.13 9.85 5.51 10.23 7.20 13.86 7.56 8.59 7.60 9.54 6.63 11.94 7.73 13.25 7.82 8.57

75 94 72 54 75 82 86 51 81 73 65 58 69 62 47 45 74 71 58 57 53 62

113 113 112 110 110 110 109 108 108 106 103 101 100 99 98 94 93 93 92 91 90 90

7.74 9.08 7.76 7.09 7.97 13.87 10.79 6.75 5.28 9.12 8.45 9.50 7.18 13.36 9.15 7.13 9.84

48 61 64 63 33 61 64 75 65 45 61 46 68 66 51 70 37

88 84 84 83 83 83 83 82 82 81 79 78 78 78 78 77 76

(continued)

APPENDICES

Table B.1

169

(continued)

N

Collocate

112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151

use (v.) Vuk (Karadži´c) say basis speech Belgrade Greek problem SANU Croats translation law teach European course grammar group my relation become political writer education own that get only decision translated Latin section textbook four exam living media translate students (K-12) percent translator

MI score

Texts

Total

12.79 7.57 11.64 9.41 6.51 5.46 7.76 5.37 6.19 6.48 6.20 6.13 8.05 7.12 7.98 8.34 10.75 5.67 6.56 6.94 6.23 9.14 5.37 8.14 8.73 7.31 9.34 6.81 9.30 7.87 10.40 8.23 5.08 6.69 8.50 8.43 9.40 5.80 7.03 6.20

55 50 64 60 49 64 34 59 40 42 54 47 49 48 43 44 43 44 50 50 52 46 49 46 53 52 50 41 49 35 38 44 46 38 47 35 42 42 32 42

76 75 74 72 71 70 70 70 70 69 69 69 68 67 67 65 65 65 65 65 64 63 62 62 62 60 60 60 60 59 59 59 58 57 57 56 56 56 55 55

(continued)

170

APPENDICES

Table B.1

(continued)

N

Collocate

152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191

world (adj.) introduce I these represent work (v.) constitution others case desire (v.) Europe always Bulgarian nation need (n.) study (n.) make (v.) identity compulsory poetry Romanian so-called be able to communication level area instructional engage Montenegrins department consider art day defense possibility war difference thing society think

MI score

Texts

Total

7.40 12.45 7.89 9.36 5.53 5.80 6.69 8.06 7.62 10.03 7.33 7.22 6.96 11.23 7.05 6.37 6.02 6.31 8.16 10.49 8.65 8.37 7.20 8.06 6.70 7.54 7.63 9.66 6.48 9.27 5.01 6.15 5.70 8.67 5.67 5.95 10.73 5.86 5.84 6.60

45 41 41 51 48 48 40 46 45 49 41 49 24 37 43 40 43 37 36 63 33 36 35 33 38 38 31 39 22 30 42 42 41 30 38 27 35 38 32 37

55 55 54 54 54 54 54 53 53 53 52 52 51 51 51 51 50 50 50 50 50 50 49 48 48 48 47 46 46 46 46 46 45 45 44 44 44 44 43 43

(continued)

APPENDICES

Table B.1

171

(continued)

N

Collocate

192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231

change (n.) Ruthenian text protection old lead (v.) spirit philological Latin (adj.) best poem majority link framework remain knowledge Slovak faith come spoken understand such center title attend belong element biggest write both self study (v.) linguistic written beginning development influence (n.) community elective published

MI score

Texts

Total

6.62 8.88 5.74 7.41 7.37 6.63 6.60 7.97 11.10 6.37 7.04 9.34 7.32 8.61 6.85 7.61 8.65 6.89 6.61 10.14 7.05 5.61 5.70 9.50 7.86 6.04 8.90 5.51 8.37 5.89 5.62 9.23 8.38 9.45 5.95 5.57 6.82 6.66 6.37 6.39

33 24 30 39 33 39 34 35 27 39 35 36 35 30 33 34 27 32 37 28 33 36 29 26 23 27 23 33 30 26 32 26 25 29 32 28 25 27 20 30

43 43 43 43 42 42 41 41 41 41 41 41 41 40 40 40 40 40 39 39 39 39 38 38 38 38 37 37 37 36 36 35 35 35 35 35 35 35 34 34

(continued)

172

APPENDICES

Table B.1

(continued)

N

Collocate

232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254

system use (v.) expert tradition third philosophical Croatia Italian expression to not have her publish council Belgrade (adj.) edition existence Cyrillic (adj.) citizens linguistics change needed republic Ijekavian (dialect) plan association linguist reason six high school violence scientific necessary never standard (n.) exclusively Karadži´c (Vuk) come into being explain preservation

255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270

MI score

Texts

Total

9.58 10.39 7.47 6.62 6.46 6.39 6.48 6.55 8.84 6.57 9.47 8.07 5.80 6.52 5.95 8.03 7.91 9.02 8.17 5.76 7.06 6.29 7.26

29 29 30 29 28 24 26 27 25 32 29 32 24 29 25 24 23 25 23 22 28 25 22

34 34 34 34 34 33 33 33 33 33 33 33 33 32 32 32 31 31 31 31 31 31 30

6.20 6.96 5.77 5.64 5.14 5.14 10.11 6.33 8.16 5.50 7.19 8.51 6.33 6.76 9.21 6.67

24 23 28 20 25 24 23 25 25 26 21 25 25 22 23 23

30 30 29 29 29 28 28 28 28 28 28 27 27 27 27 27

(continued)

APPENDICES

Table B.1

173

(continued)

N

Collocate

271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305

accept structure claim (v.) teachers (K-8) see state (adj.) Nikši´c form concern (v.) often name (v.) nature sense high (school) creation topic last means (n.) everyday difficult (adv.) authorities significance academy institution opinion consideration bigger work (n.) less/er origin project (n.) hundred interest studying government

MI score

Texts

Total

7.65 7.05 7.58 6.27 10.42 7.00 7.59 6.23 5.34 5.09 7.03 6.54 6.11 8.12 6.13 5.49 6.27 6.50 8.18 8.10 5.07 5.70 5.99 5.39 5.26 5.07 5.69 5.47 5.15 6.67 8.95 5.55 5.74 7.87 5.66

25 20 26 20 23 20 20 20 23 24 20 23 24 22 20 23 23 22 20 24 20 20 22 21 21 20 21 20 21 21 20 20 20 20 20

27 27 27 27 27 26 26 26 26 25 25 25 25 25 25 25 24 24 24 24 24 24 23 23 23 23 23 22 22 22 22 22 21 21 20

Index

A agent variation, 53, 85, 86, 90, 92 Albania/Albanian(s), 8, 17, 80, 103, 132 all Serbs in one state, 132 American(s), 104, 107, 113, 114 Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), 52, 85, 87 Anglo-American, 104, 114 argumentation theory, 55 Australia, 112, 114 Austria/Austrian, 104, 114, 136 Austria-Hungary, 5, 7, 16, 17, 107 authenticity, 107, 110, 111, 115 authority, 14

B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 154 Balkans, 3, 4, 12, 14, 16, 24, 25, 28, 37, 104, 124, 129, 131, 132, 135, 136, 148, 154, 156 banal nationalism, 127 bias, 54

Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2, 5, 10, 11, 13, 15–17, 103, 105, 132, 156 Bosniak(s), 2, 5, 7–11, 16, 17, 77, 78, 80, 82–84, 101, 103–105, 108, 110, 113, 114, 122, 125, 136, 149, 156 Bosnian(s), 2, 8, 10, 11, 13, 17, 68, 69, 75, 77, 78, 82–84, 91, 103–105, 110, 113, 160 British National Corpus (BNC), 50 Bulgarian(s), 5, 131 Byzantine Empire, 124 C Canada, 112, 114 Catholic(s), 84, 132, 135, 149 Central South Slavs (CSS), 2, 5, 11, 14, 16, 25, 37, 63, 64, 66, 68, 71, 75–78, 80, 82–85, 91, 95, 113, 122, 124–128, 131, 136, 137, 145, 153–156, 160 chauvinism, 156 China, 102 Christian(ity), 107, 112

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Ajši´c, Language and Ethnonationalism in Contemporary West Central Balkans, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72177-0

175

176

INDEX

chronotope(s), 154 church, 109, 116 Cluster Analysis (CA), 36, 52, 53, 87, 92, 145–147 collocation analysis, 35, 38, 49, 51, 52, 63, 66, 68, 145, 146 colonialist, 126 Communist, 137 contestation, 2, 3, 12–15, 28, 37, 68–70, 75, 78, 82–87, 91, 92, 94, 95, 103–105, 107, 109–111, 115 corpora/corpus, 24, 34–38, 47–54, 143–147, 149, 150, 161 Corpus-Linguistic (CL), 24, 34, 35, 37, 38, 54, 64, 143–145, 147, 150, 154 counter-hegemonic, 135 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), 24, 29, 49, 53–55, 64, 99, 130, 137, 150, 154 Croatia(n), 2, 3, 5–13, 15–17, 68, 81, 83, 84, 102, 105, 110–114, 124, 128, 132, 134, 135, 137, 160 Croatianhood, 111 Croatization, 84 Croato-Serbian, 111, 113 Croats, 5, 7, 9–11, 16, 17, 77, 82–84, 101, 103, 110–112, 122, 125, 133, 134, 136, 138, 149, 155, 156 Cyrillic, 3, 7, 9, 17, 57, 75–77, 91, 94, 100–102, 107, 115, 122, 123, 129, 132, 134 D Dalmatia, 128 Declaration on the Common Language, 3 Declaration on the Name and Position of the Croatian Literary Language, 9

diachronic variation, 53, 86 diglossia, 123, 136 discourse analysis, 24, 34, 35 Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), 53, 55, 99, 113 discourse of contestation, 122, 125, 134, 138 discourse(s) of endangerment, 122–125, 134, 149, 151 discursive consciousness, 27 ´ c, 137, 155 Dobrica Cosi´ downsampling, 64, 144, 145 Dubioza Kolektiv, 160 Dutch, 102 E Eastern Europe, 4, 12, 24, 153 Eastern Orthodox Christians, 149 Ekavian, 7, 9 endangerment, 69, 70, 75, 76, 85, 91, 94, 95, 100–102, 115, 123–125, 128, 129, 131, 133, 134 Engels, Friedrich, 28 English, 64, 68, 81, 100, 102, 104, 107, 112–114, 126, 127 Enlightenment, 4, 64, 152, 153 erasure, 123, 127, 129, 152 essentialist ideology, 125 ethnic, 3, 5, 7–10, 13, 15, 16, 149, 151, 154, 155 ethnic group(s), 124, 126, 137 ethnic identity, 153 ethnicity, 25, 31, 33, 130 ethnic nationalism, 25, 126, 128 ethnocultural, 69, 78 ethnolinguistic, 4, 14–16, 29, 48, 55, 63, 66, 68, 69, 76–78, 80, 81, 83–85, 87, 91, 109, 111, 115 ethnolinguistic identity(ies), 122, 123, 128, 131, 145, 148, 151–154 ethnolinguistic nationalism(s), 150, 153

INDEX

ethnolinguistic system, 129 ethnonational, 10–14, 16, 68, 71, 75, 77 ethnonational affiliation, 124 ethnonational identity(ies), 122, 124, 125, 128, 130, 131, 145, 151, 154, 156 ethnonationalism(s), 4, 5, 14, 15, 24, 25, 48, 64, 81, 85, 115, 126, 129, 130, 134–136, 144, 145, 148, 151, 153–156, 160, 161 Europe, 78, 100, 103, 113, 128, 129, 132 European Union (EU), 78, 100, 103 Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), 24, 35, 38, 52, 53, 66, 71, 85, 145–147

177

Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, 132 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 4, 66, 95, 127, 129, 136, 149, 152–154 hermeneutic circle, 34, 55, 66, 99 heterogeneous, 63, 64, 71, 95, 126, 145, 147, 152 heuristic, 36, 61, 66 Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA), 87 Hindi, 126 homogeneous, 126–128, 132, 152 Hungary/Hungarians, 103, 132

G Gaj, Ljudevit, 2, 5, 137 Garašanin, Ilija, 132, 135 genocide, 8, 11 Germanic, 131 German(s), 84, 104, 112, 114, 126, 129, 131, 136 glottonym(s), 127 Goffman, Erving, 154 Greater Serbia/Greater Serbian, 131–133, 135, 155 Greeks, 131

I iconization, 122, 152 identity(ies), 2, 3, 5, 8, 10–16, 28–31, 33, 34, 37, 63, 66–69, 71, 75–78, 80–85, 91, 101, 108, 109, 111, 115 ideological discourse(s), 71, 75, 85, 92, 95, 146–148, 151 Ijekavian, 7, 9 Ikavian, 7 Illyrianists, 5 independence, 3, 5, 7, 10, 16, 17 indexicality, 122, 151 inflectional, 64, 71 interdiscursivity, 85 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), 131 intra-ethnic, 123 intra-linguistic, 127 Italians, 107

H Habsburg, 154 hegemony, 32, 33, 150, 151, 156

J Japanese, 102

F Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 122, 129, 152, 154 fractal recursivity, 12, 122, 152 French, 102, 131

178

INDEX

K Karadži´c, Vuk, 16, 63, 64, 66, 82, 84, 85, 95, 108, 111, 112, 114, 124, 132, 134–137, 148, 154 keyword analysis/keyword analyses, 35, 37, 48, 49, 51, 52, 61, 147 King Alexander, 7 Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, 7 King Nicholas I, 107 Kosovo, 123 Kruskal-Wallis, 85, 86 L language ideology(ies), 4, 13–15, 17, 124, 127–131, 133, 135, 144, 147–151, 153, 160 language philosophy, 127, 129 Language-Related Discourse (LRD), 14, 15, 17, 48, 63, 66, 70, 85, 86, 122, 123, 127, 129, 135, 136, 144, 147, 148, 150, 151, 160 Latin, 7, 9, 17, 57, 69, 76, 77, 100–102, 115, 122, 123 linguistic affiliation, 126, 130 linguistic authority, 153 linguistic differentiation, 152, 154 Locke, John, 4, 127, 129, 152, 153 M Macedonia/Macedonian(s), 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 15, 17, 124, 131 Make Serbia Great Again, 156 Mann-Whitney U test, 87 Marx, Karl, 28 media, 13, 14 Middle East, 130 minority(ies), 69, 70, 75–78, 80, 91, 94, 102, 132, 133 mixed-methods, 14, 34, 49, 148

modernism, 122, 130, 153 Mohammedan, 84, 110, 132, 135 monolingual(ism), 68, 127, 153 Montenegro/Montenegrin(s), 2, 3, 5, 7–11, 13, 15–17, 64, 68, 69, 75, 79–85, 91, 92, 103, 105–110, 113, 114, 116, 122, 125, 132, 136, 156 moral panic, 123 mother tongue, 68, 79, 81, 102, 105–107, 109, 110, 125 Muslims, 108, 149

N national identity, 127, 129, 131, 134, 136 nationalism/nationalist, 3, 4, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 24, 25, 29, 33, 95, 108, 126, 127, 129–134, 136, 137, 144, 150, 153, 154, 156 nationality, 31, 69 National Socialists, 136 nationhood, 126, 129, 155 nation(s), 2, 4, 5, 7, 12–14, 26, 34, 36, 37, 67–69, 77, 78, 82, 84, 101–104, 110, 111, 114, 115, 126, 129, 136, 149, 153, 155 nation-state, 131–133 naturalism, 153, 155 NDH, 8 New Zealand, 112, 114 Novi Sad Agreement, 8

O Orthodox, 84, 110–112, 116, 123, 124, 132, 135, 136 Ottoman Empire, 15, 16, 154 Ottoman Turks, 123, 132 ownership, 13, 14, 75, 82, 84, 85, 91, 102, 109, 110, 127

INDEX

P perennialism, 153 polycentric(ity), 4, 9, 11, 16, 126, 136 Portuguese, 112, 114, 126 power, 28, 30–33 practical consciousness, 95 primordial(ism), 128, 130, 153 pro-fascist, 137 pseudolinguistic(s), 69, 83, 109 pseudoscience, 82, 85, 95, 104, 106, 108–111, 115, 124, 125, 134, 136, 149, 151 pseudoscientific argumentation, 160

Q qualitative, 34–36, 64, 68, 71, 76, 78–80, 82, 84, 92, 94, 99, 113, 116, 144, 147 quantitative, 34, 35, 37, 64, 87, 92, 95, 99, 113, 116, 126, 128, 134, 135, 144, 147, 148, 154

R Roman Catholic, 84, 110 Romantic(ism), 4, 66, 124, 129, 131, 132, 137, 148, 149, 152–154 Romantic nationalism, 25, 148

S Sanjak, 78 SANU Memorandum, 125, 133, 135, 137 Scandinavia, 126 script(s), 3, 7, 9, 10, 17 Serbia/Serbian(s), 2, 3, 5–17, 48, 57, 64, 66, 68, 69, 76–84, 86, 95, 100–116, 122–124, 126–137, 149–156, 160

179

Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU), 69, 75, 81–83, 91, 104, 109, 110, 113, 124, 125, 129, 133–135, 137, 155 Serbian Orthodox Church, 123, 124, 136 Serbian Royal Academy, 135 Serbo-Croatian, 2–4, 7–11, 16, 68, 83, 107, 110–113, 124, 134, 135, 160 Serbs, 5, 7, 9–11, 16, 17, 77, 80–85, 95, 101, 102, 108–112, 114, 122, 124, 129, 131–136, 148, 149, 155 Serb(s)/Serbhood, 2, 16, 17, 102, 106, 108, 110 Slavic, 124, 126, 128, 129, 131, 135, 137 Slovene(s), 7, 131, 133 slovesnost , 129 South Slavs, 5–7, 77, 95, 101, 102, 109, 110, 114, 154, 155 sovereignty, 3, 13, 125, 130, 136 Spanish, 112, 114, 126 standard, 4, 6–9, 11, 13, 16 standardization, 109, 127, 132 standard language ideology, 123, 127, 151 Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), 53, 90 Štokavian, 5, 6, 84, 149 Šumadija, 128 Surrealists, 159, 160 Swiss, 104, 114 Switzerland, 136, 137 synchronic variation, 38, 53, 85 T thematic analysis, 99, 113 thematic discourse(s), 76, 85, 87, 90, 92, 94, 95, 105, 146, 148 the West, 100

180

INDEX

three-step approach, 146, 147 Tito, Josip Broz, 133 Topic Modeling (TM), 24, 35, 38, 136, 147 topoi/topos, 55, 99, 113–115, 122, 125, 126, 134, 160 triangulation, 36, 49, 137 Trump, Donald, 156 Turkish, 108

W Weinreich, Max, 161 West Central Balkans, 2, 3, 11, 14, 17, 128, 144, 148, 150, 151, 153, 156, 160 Western, 122, 126, 129, 132, 153 Western civilization, 122 Western Europe, 12 Western European, 126 WordSmith Tools, 50, 53, 64

U United States, 112, 114, 128, 156 Urdu, 126 V Vienna Literary Agreement, 6, 7, 137 Vojvodina, 132 von Humboldt, Alexander, 149

Y Yugoslavhood, 111 Yugoslavia, 3–5, 7–10, 15, 16, 85, 113, 123, 124, 131–135, 137, 155, 156, 159