The Impact of Purism on the Development of the Slovene Standard Language

Abstract

Purism has played a significant role throughout the history of written Slovene. It has been directed at both external and internal threats to the language. Chief among the former have been German, the dominant language of the region, which has influ- enced the Slovene vernacular at all linguistic levels, and Serbo-Croatian, which served as the de-facto idiom of inter-ethnic communication in the former Yugoslavia. Xeno- phobic purism has succeeded in removing most German loanwords from the standard language and replacing them with loanwords from other Slavic languages and calques. Inasmuch as the majority of the German loanwords have been retained in the spoken vernacular this has had the net effect of distancing the standard language from the respective vernacular. On the other hand, the attempt to remove the numerous syntactic and phraseological calques based on German models has been generally unsuccessful in practical terms. However, the puristic reaction to these covert influences has served an important symbolic function in emphasizing a sense of Slovene linguistic identity in the linguistic consciousness of the Slovene speech community. Serbo-Croatian lexical elements, on the other hand, have posed a particularly intractable problem for Slovene purists. This was primarily because in the nineteenth century the Croatian abstract lexicon played a major part in providing standard Slovene with acceptable replacements for internationalisms and Germanisms. Secondly, because of a common involvement in Yugoslavia and the close genetic relationship between Slovene and Serbo-Croatian it was often difficult in practice to identify Serbo-Croatian material in Slovene with any degree of certainty. Indeed, a systematic, dispassionate identification of such material remains as one of the many tasks confronting Slovene scholarship in the years of political independence. Internally, purists have at various times attempted to archaize and Slavicize the orthography and morphology of the standard language. This has fostered a spirit of hypercorrection and pendantry in some Slovene linguistic circles. On the other hand, the strain of ethnographic purism, which goes back to the seminal figure of Jernej Kopitar, has served as an antidote to both archaization and Slavization of Slovene by seeking justification for the norms of standard Slovene in the contemporary dialects. This helps to explain why puristic intervention in standard Slovene can be generally characterized as moderate and free of excesses. Nevertheless, it is equally clear that the puristic debate, which has resounded in the times of Trubar, Kopitar, Cop, and Pregeren right down to the present day, will continue to be a significant factor as the Slovene standard language seeks to define its role on the new socio-political stage of the Slovene-speaking territory.

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