Assertive discourse and folk linguistics: Serbian nationalist discourse about the cyrillic script in the 21st century

Abstract

Ever since the wars of the Yugoslav secession in the nineties, linguistic nationalism has proven to have been among the more relevant instances in the discursive construction of national identity and new languages, dubbed by Ranko Bugarski as ‘administrative successors’ of Serbo-Croatian. Even though contemporary linguistics still classifies Serbo-Croatian as one language with regional varieties (commonly dubbed ‘polycentric standardized languages’ in linguistics), nationalist linguists have been working tirelessly to discursively construct their own, local languages, based on national identity, script and religion. Since most scholarly production has been dealing with nationalist linguistics related to the breakup of Serbo-Croatian during and in the immediate aftermath of the wars of the Yugoslav secession, not much has been written on the current state of nationalist linguistics in Serbia in the 21st century. This article deals with the contemporary nationalist linguist discourse on the topic of the Serbian version of the polycentric standardized Serbo-Croatian language, its discursive connections to religion, nationality and the Otherizing of Croatia as the discursive Other against which a Serbian language needs to be constructed. As the article will show, this is achieved by assertive, declarative discourse.

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