Suchergebnisse

Since the nature of the Serbo-Croatian varieties is seen as having political implications, many researchers of Serbo-Croatian have built theories to support either an ideology of togetherness, which glosses over the differences between the standard varieties, or an idology of separateness, which treats the varieties as completely separate languages. The main ideologies of togetherness are the Illyrian Movement, 'Serbo-Croatism', 'Yugoslavism', and 'Naški'; examples of ideologies of separateness, which arose in reaction to these, are Silić's tridialectal "language as a standard", Brozović's Central South Slavic "diasystem", Babić's "language level", and Marojević's "Serbs all and everywhere". As sociolinguists, we should beware of letting ideologies guide our research.

The paper compares the current language policy in four countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia. One aspect is the definition of official languages at the state level: Four national varieties of Serbo-Croatian have been elevated to this function. The other aspect is the treatment of minority languages. All four countries have ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. All in all, minority languages are being cared for in all four countries, which can be attributed to a tradition of liberal minority policies going back to Socialist Yugoslavia. However, problems arise for three reasons: as a consequence of the wars of the 1990s, the formerly opposing nations are not granted the rights they deserve; Roma are still often treated with condescension; and lack of personnel, money, and technical equipment obstruct the implementation of laws on minority languages.

The Russian spelling reform of 1917-1918 was very successful - so successful that many young Russians, when confronted with a pre-1917 Russian text, do not know how to read , or . However, many reforms of writing systems have not met with success. Among them are the 1930 attempt to convert Russian to the Latin alphabet; the Second Chinese Character Simplification Scheme of 1977, which the PRC government had to withdraw in 1986; the French spelling reform of 1990, which is still ignored by most of the public; and the Latinization of Uzbek of 1993-1995, gether fifteen years, has not been implemented by newspapers and magazines. This paper examines a range of writing reforms (script reforms, spelling reforms, and glyphic reforms) - mainly from the Slavic and post-Soviet area - to determine which factors influence the success or failure of a reform and to what extent. Among the factors considered are the orthographic principles touched by the reform; the motivation for it; the scientific arguments put forward in the discussion; the semiotic values associated with the reformed writing system; the timing; the political system of the country; and the literacy rate of the speech community. The results of this analysis might be a bit disillusioning for us as linguists because linguistic factors turn out to play a very minor role compared to extralinguistic factors. In fact, the most decisive factor seems to be timing.

The Russian spelling reform of 1917-1918 was very successful – so successful that many young Russians, when confronted with a pre-1917 Russian text, do not know how to read 〈ѣ〉, 〈ѳ〉 or 〈ея〉. However, many reforms of writing systems have not met with success. Among them are the 1930 attempt to convert Russian to the Latin alphabet; the Second Chinese Character Simplification Scheme of 1977, which the PRC government had to withdraw in 1986; the French spelling reform of 1990, which is still ignored by most of the public; and the Latinisation of Uzbek of 1993-1995, which, even twenty years later and after the end of the twice extended 'transitional period' of altogether fifteen years, has not been implemented by newspapers and magazines. This paper examines a range of writing reforms (script reforms, spelling reforms, and glyphic reforms) – mainly from the Slavic and post-Soviet area – to determine which factors influence the success or failure of a reform and to what extent. Among the factors considered are the orthographic principles touched by the reform; the motivation for it; the scientific arguments put forward in the discussion; the semiotic values associated with the reformed writing system; the timing; the political system of the country; and the literacy rate of the speech community. The results of this analysis might be a bit disillusioning for us as linguists because linguistic factors turn out to play a very minor role compared to extralinguistic factors. In fact, the most decisive factor seems to be timing.

Ukrainianists and Belarusianists traditionally assumed that "Ukrainian" and "Belarusian" authors of the middle period of the East Slavic language history wrote essentially in their own respective mother tongues or even native dialects; linguistic features belonging to dialects of the other of the two modern nations were regarded as "foreign" influences due to the close political and cultural ties between "Ukrainians" and "Belarusians". Nowadays more and more scholars come to acknowledge the existence at that time of a common Ruthenian literary standard. However, the relationship between this standard variety and the diversity of the Ruthenian dialects is still rather unclear. As the Ruthenian questione della lingua, i.e. the problem of choosing a dialect basis for the standard variety, was never discussed explicitly (mainly because of the overwhelming importance of Polish and Church Slavonic in the Ruthenian metalinguistic discourse), the role of intermediate dialects (e.g. Polissian), dialect mixing (e.g. Vilna and Galicia), the acceptability of individual dialect features, and linguistic conservatism (e.g. in orthography) for the standardization of Ruthenian remain to be thoroughly evaluated. This is what this paper tries to do.

The present publication complements the volume "Slavic Alphabets in Contact" (BABEL 7, 2015), compiled by the same editors. This volume, comprised of eleven contributions, focuses on problems of ethnic, cultural, linguistic and political identities among the Slavs resp. in their countries as a result of using a specific script – Latin, Cyrillic and Glagolitic. The papers are published in German, English, and Russian.