What did they call it before they called it “Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian-Montenegrin”?

In 1958 the U.S. Army called it “Serbo-Croatian”. That was during the Cold War. I was a soldier in Military Intelligence, just beginning to learn the major language of Yugoslavia at the US Army Language School, on the old Spanish Presidio of Monterey in California. Thirty-some years later the Berlin Wall came down. In Slovenia in the year 1990 I learned from an American working there (it was still Yugoslavia then) that the Army had closed down the Monterey course. The Pentagon apparently had not yet received their orders to attack Yugoslavia. They thought the Cold War was over.

Someone in Washington had other ideas. The old contingency plan to dismantle Yugoslavia was taken off the shelf, updated and implemented by the mercenaries of MPRI, and invisible government countermanded the shut-down. In 1992 a call went out for teachers of “Serbian and Croatian” at the re-named US Defense Language Institute. The announcement was a classic farce. Some petty bureaucrat at a loss how to phrase the official advertisement took his phraseology from want-ads for interpreters. It was spelled out that job applicants must be able to teach the “two languages” simultaneously or consecutively. “It” was now two languages.

One colonel took the Monterey course in Croatian and/or Serbian; he developed the Pentagon plan for the big ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Croatia in 1995.

At the University of Michigan the linguistics department chairman opposed the New-Speak and retained the designation “Serbo-Croatian”. An Austrian colleague wrote me: “Serbo-Croat” is history”. – It was of course Austrian history.

The University of Calgary in Canada ran with the political-correctness. Doctoral candidates there could now fulfill the requirement of reading ability in two foreign languages by passing exams in Serbian or Croatian. Queuing up to apply for the test in “the two languages” Croats and Serbs were united in laughter.

Then there were three. At the ICTY in The Hague “it” became “Bosnian-Croatian- Serbian”, all three spoken simultaneously. Consequently, Vojislav Šešelj demanded that court interpreters should turn Croatian testimony into Serbian for him.

Then “it” was four. Americans applying for Fulbright Grants in 2005 and 2006 were “informed” that the language of the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro / Srbija I Crna Gora ought to be to be called “Montenegrin”, a separate language, if Montenegrins wanted it so. Language teachers in Montenegro were ordered to call “it” Crnogorski / Montenegrin or Mother Tongue, if they wanted to keep their jobs. Dozens of honest Montenegrin teachers felt otherwise, that the language they were teaching was in fact Serbian. They were fired and stripped of their pensions.

The linguistic theory of Vuk Stefanovich Karadžich, that south Slavs – Catholic and Orthodox – spoke the same language, was declared passé. The policy of the multi-ethnic Austrian Empire and, later, the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867-1918) was both liberal and reactionary. It was liberal in that subject nations had the right to be schooled in their own languages, use them in court and see them printed on the currency. The policy was reactionary in that this was a measure to keep the Slavs, who were a 60% majority in the Dual Monarchy, subject to German and Hungarian rulers.

Croatian linguists themselves had reservations at the time about using the Zagreb dialect as a standard, for it seemed too Slovenian. Zagreb dialect, for one thing, shares with Slovenian the interrogative pronoun kaj ‘what?’. (In all the western and eastern territories Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs use another word for ‘what?’, that is, 'što?'.)

Both Vienna, with an eye to coherence of the Empire, and Rome with an eye to conversion of Eastern Orthodox “schismatics”, smiled on the efforts of Archbishop Strossmayer to teach a new auxiliary language to the Croats to hasten their integration into a broader society and function as missionaries. It was some time before many Croats at all could speak their new literary language. In the words of R. G. A. DeBray (1951):

"Ljudevit Gaj (Croat linguist, 1808-1872) chose the je- version of the što dialect, the same dialect as chosen by Vuk Karadžich and one of the most widely spoken in the Yugoslav lands. Gaj introduced a phonetic spelling exactly corresponding to that introduced by Vuk for Cyrillic. Thus he helped the Croats to give up their local dialect as a literary medium and enter a wider field. The final seal to this work was set by the Vienna Literary Agreement [Beèki književni dogovor] in 1850, when all the leading Yugoslav scholars of the time, including both Vuk and Gaj, and agreed on the final adoption of a common literary language on the following basis: the adoption of a single dialect in its unadulterated form rather than a composite language embodying the features of several dialects; this dialect was to be the je-version of the što dialect, already mentioned above, the most widely spoken dialect except in Serbia..."

Bosnian. Is that bosnjaèki or bosanski? Muslim Bosnians take no united stand in practice. In Chicago a school for Muslim Bosnian children displays a big banner “Govori Bosanski! – Speak Bosnian!”. At Northeastern Illinois University in 1992 the debate “got physical”. I watched as a Junoesque blonde give a good shove to young man who had called “it” “bošnjaèki”; she told him in no uncertain terms that “it” was “bosanski”.

At Truman College in Chicago I asked students with Muslim names “what country do you come from?”–“Bosnia” they all said. “What language do you speak?”. “Bosnian.” Then I responded (in Serbian) that I too speak – “… bosanski i bošnjaèki i hrvatski i hrvatsko-srpski i srpski i crnogorski…” They always laughed. One smiling man flatly said: “it’s the same language”.

At a nearby grocery store, a clerk with the Muslim name Amira revealed the stress normal people are put under. When we first chatted at the check-out counter, she asked me if I was of Yugoslav origin. Her surprise was great to hear I was “irskog porekla”. Since then she always greets me with “moj irac / my Irishman”... One day she remarked that she was pleased that I always greeted her in srpski. She then hesitated, rolled her eyes and said the PC word “bosanski”. (She didn’t say hrvatski, since I hadn’t said “podrijetla”, which Bosnians – Muslim and Christian – would use.)

The literary Croatian word for “wedding” is vijenchanje, derived from the noun vijenac “wreath”, which in turn is from the verb viti “to twine, braid, wreathe”. One infers from this example of formal language morphology and etymology, when mapped onto the material, ethnographic and religious facts, that the literary Croatian language is historically a Serb dialect, since the Eastern Orthodox (Serb) wedding ceremony in its traditional form involves the crowning of bride and groom with wreathes of green, while such a custom is not found in the Roman Catholic (Croat) wedding rite.

Here is what the Catholic Encyclopedia teaches about Croats and Serbs, in the entry Albania: “... every other race in the Balkans, with the exception of the Western Serbs, called Hroats, went over to schism…”.

My last anecdote about newly created “languages” is from the year 2006. A British real estate developer in recently independent Montenegro remarked that her business was facilitated by her knowledge of Serbo-Croat. Down to earth people don’t buckle under to propaganda and Political Correctness.

Honest and competent scholars are not extinct. Early in the Bosnian War: Harvard Professor Mark Pinson spoke of the crop of nouveaux balcanistes, regarding their knowledge, or lack of it, of Balkan languages:

"To help remedy this situation, for both general readers and specialists in Islamic studies, most of whom do not read Serbian, I am exploring the possibility of having translated from Serbian into English several articles and books by local Muslim historians on the Muslim community in the Ottoman, Austrian, and Yugoslav periods.”

Abraham Lincoln in his Illinois lawyering days once asked a witness in court “if you called a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs would a dog have?” The witness: “Five.” Lincoln: “No, even if you call a dog’s tail a leg, it’s still a tail.”

Catholic Encyclopedia. 1912. Catholic Encyclopedia. On line at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01253b.html

DeBray, R. G. A. 1951. Guide to the Slavonic Languages. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc.

Pinson, Mark. 1994. Editor. The Muslims of Bosnia-Hercegovina. Their historic development from the Middle Ages to the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Center for Medieval Studies

Stolz, Benjamin. 1984. Serbo-Croatian as a Balkan Diplomatic Language during the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

In my university days of learning Russian, the language of Yugoslavia was always Serbo-Croatian.

“When the next war comes in Europe it will come from some damn silly thing in the Balkans’’— Otto Von Bismark.

the Slavs, who were a 60% majority in the Dual Monarchy, subject to German and Hungarian rulers

????

The last census of Austria-Hungary had:

Germans 25.3%
Hungarians 17.7%
Romanians 6.6%
Italians 1.7%
Others 0.2%
Subtotal 52.2%

Czechs 12.4%
Serbo-Croats 11.3%
Poles 8.9%
Ukranians 8.1%
Slovaks 4.6%
Slovenians 2.6%
Subtotal 47.8%