Jedinstvenost i različitost. Bilješke o književnom jeziku (1918–1941)
Unity and Diversity. Notes on Standard Language (1918–1941)

Author(s): Krešimir Mićanović
Subject(s): Cultural history, Studies of Literature, Croatian Literature, Polish Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: standard language; literary unity; variants; recensions; Serbo-Croato-Slovene; Serbo-Croatian standard language; Croatian and Serbian standard languages
Summary/Abstract: The paper analyses contributions to the debate on standard language published in the period between the end of the First World War and early 1941. Even though the Constitution of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes sanctioned “Serbo-Croato-Slovene” as the official language, the prevailing attitude, not only among the philologists, was that the Slovenes have a standard language of their own, whereas the Croats and the Serbs share a common one. In the name of national unity, the champions of Serbo-Croat “literary unity” incessantly propagated linguistic unification, i.e. instituting a single standard usage, thereby implicitly admitting that differences in standard language are of more significance than they allowed. In the papers under analysis, lexical differences between Croatian and Serbian usage were taken as confirming the completion of the process of differentiation, i.e. the existence of two recensions/two standard languages (Bošković), as well as being identified as variants of a standard language (Đorđić), while a younger generation of Croatian linguists (Krstić, Guberina) aimed not only to list but also to elaborate the differences between the two standard languages – Croatian and Serbian. The polemics and discussions from the late 1930s through the very beginning of 1940s established two diametrically opposed positions. On the first view, there is a single standard language shared by Croats and Serbs, and the differences that nevertheless exist are to be removed by unified usage; and on the other, there are two standard languages, Croatian and Serbian. The discussions of the unity of standard language were renewed in the Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, and in conclusion it is indicated that that the debate between Croatian and Serbian linguists on single standard language was resolved by both sides acquiescing to the view that there are variants in standard language, which was a viable compromise.

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