Languages in context

It is impossible to understand the present-day condition of a language and our perceptions of it without looking into its history and the politics surrounding it. Consider, for instance, two of the languages in our project, Bosnian and Surzhyk.

Bosnian

Bosnian is one of the three official languages, next to Croatian and Serbian, of Bosnia-Herzegovina. It belongs to the South-Slavonic group of languages, which also includes Slovene, Macedonian and Bulgarian. Bosnia borders Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro, which all used to be part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1945 to 1991. The variations of each country, being Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian, are mutually intelligible and share a large part of their lexicon and grammatical structures, with slight differences especially between Croatian and Serbian variations. Montenegrin leans toward Serbian, while in Bosnian it depends whether speakers live close to the Croatian or Serbian border or whether they live in the south, where a Croatian variation, that is entirely different from the variation in Zagreb, is spoken.

Nationalist movements, which led to the war from 1992 to 1996 which hit Bosnia especially heavy, have also found their way into discussions around language. Despite linguistic evidence, some would argue that the variations are too different to be considered as one language, although there is linguistic evidence to disprove this claim.

Information provided by Ms Nathalie Stummer

Surzhyk

Surzhyk as a phenomenon emerged in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when the imperial assimilation policy interrupted the development of the Old Ukrainian written tradition in Ukraine. Nowadays, surzhyk has become popular due to the opposite situation: massive Ukrainisation rather than Russification. In the 17th and 18th centuries, people switched from Ukrainian to Russian to get into the administrative and managerial sphere and have a chance for a better life. Nowadays, Surzhyk has gained popularity because of the rejection of everything Russian and the transition to Ukrainian in everyday life through a conscious rejection of any cultural heritage of the occupier.

Information provided by Mrs Viktoriia Medvied