Post by rex362 on Jan 5, 2012 19:30:54 GMT -5
an interesting read of sorts .....
www.todayszaman.com/news-267452-confused-balkan-languages-by-hajrudin-somun*.html
2 January 2012,
One feature of the Balkan Peninsula is a congestion of different peoples, faiths, cultures and languages that have been living together for centuries, while confronting one another at the same time.
It seems that Europe has pushed all its merits and demerits to its southeastern corner. Languages, my prime interest at this moment, have become one of the main points of tension in the many nationalist discourses that dominate regional politics. Instead of being social constructs, ethno-linguistic identities are primarily political constructs. Some Balkan nations deny the right of others to have their own language and some claim that others have usurped their language. The 1990s wars, aggressions and ethnic cleansings have also affected the languages. We Balkanians can somehow orient ourselves but I imagine how a traveler to our region might be amazed listening to people from four countries who claim to speak different languages, but understand each other completely. One can say that the Biblical confusion of tongues is being repeated in the Balkans. That widely known story of confusion, when the original language became several languages, has roots in ancient Babylon, but today it seems as if the Balkans are echoing the Lord’s words from Genesis 11:7, “Let us go down and confuse their language.”
There are 10 major languages spoken today in the Balkans by around 65 million people, if we exclude 10 million Turks who live in the peninsula. Going from the Aegean to the Black Sea, there is Greek, Bulgarian and Romanian, all three belonging to various linguistic groups and written with different alphabets. Further west, there is Albanian and Macedonian. The majority of Albanians speak two dialects of Arvanitika, the only tongue inherited from the ancient Illyrian people. That gave them an advantage over Serbs in regional conflicts and wars, because almost no one understood their language. The Macedonians have problems with their eastern and western neighbors alike regarding their language. Bulgarians recognize neither their nation nor their language. Greeks are more polite; they do not recognize only the name of their state but also their language. Bulgarians are a Slavic people and so is their language, but it is believed -- especially by Turkish nationalists -- that their name was adopted from a Turkic tribe that invaded the Balkans in the seventh century and was later absorbed by Slavs. Romanians proudly speak a language similar to Latin, French and Italian, although it is fairly distant from its Romance relatives.
Languages, as well as the people who speak them, have their minorities. Some are spoken in all Balkan countries, such as the language of the Roma, Romani or Gypsies, which was brought from India, the ancient homeland of the Roma, perhaps 1,000 years ago. As proof that human beings preserve languages longer than religion or any other aspect of human identity, I recall the case of a Gypsy woman and the Croatian poetess Vesna Krmpotic. Following her husband who was a diplomat to India, she learned Hindi. When she returned home, a Gypsy woman knocked at her door, offering some eggs in exchange for clothes. When the poetess asked her something in Hindi, the woman replied, astonished, “How it is that you know my language?”
Jews in the Balkans
The remaining Jews in the Balkans speak the local languages, but some of them also speak Ladino, or the Judeo-Spanish that they brought from Spain, after their expulsion to the Ottoman Empire. Many of them settled in Thessaloniki, and some settled in Bosnia. My schoolmate David Kamhi led the Chanukah prayer in Sarajevo’s synagogue last week in Judeo-Spanish, which adopted many words from Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic and French. The considerable Hungarian minorities in Romania and Serbia speak Hungarian, of course, and the small Tatar community in the south speaks a Turkic dialect. In the western parts of Macedonia, and less in Kosovo, Turkish is spoken by the Turkish minority and by other people as well. In Greece you can still hear an old Cappadocian-Greek brought from Anatolia. In the Croatian province of Istria, close to Italy, an Istro-Romanian dialect is only spoken by 1,000 people.
When it comes to the languages that are the mostly widely used in the Balkans, many more problems result from politicking than they do from the language itself. Through three-quarters of the last century Serbo-Croatian was used in four federal republics of the former Yugoslavia: Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia. After Yugoslavia’s dismemberment beginning in the 1990s, Croatian became the official language in Croatia, and Serbian in Serbia. When Montenegro became independent, it called its language Montenegrin. In Bosnia and Herzegovina three languages are now in use: Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian.
Language as on identity marker
There was and still is, in fact, one common language that is written in two alphabets and spoken in four countries, but with different names. As was emphasized in an Academy of Finland study, Balkan languages are “identity markers on the way to a pluralistic society,” and they are a reflection of the regional developments that “seem only to resume the aggressive nation-building process which had partly been in check during the Cold War era,” according to Croatian linguist Snjezana Kordic. She stresses the “linguistic criteria of mutual understanding as the essential evidence of the equality of two or more languages. … Thus, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin are the same languages,” she concludes. Put another way, people in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other countries all speak English but they do not call it Canadian, Australian or New Zealander. The same example is used by Serb linguistic-nationalists, but with the opposite aim. After a recent discussion at the department of language of the Serb Academy of Science, the academy announced, “The existence of the Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin languages should be rejected in the historical area of the Serbian language.” By their estimation, Serbian is spoken by 20 million people in the Balkans, in the same way that English is the spoken language of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Serbian and even more Croatian linguists, supported by politicians, strive to solidify differences between their languages as much as possible. In Belgrade’s elevators, for example, floors one and two are written “sprat 1” and “sprat 2.” But in Zagreb, they are written “kat 1” and “kat 2” just to be different from Belgrade. Most people probably don’t know that “kat” is neither Croatian nor Slavic, but a Turkish word.
All nations have the right to call their languages as they want, of course. It is normal that Serbs and Croats call their languages Serbian and Croatian. But denying the same right to Bosnians and Montenegrins recalls old, still-existing nationalist ambitions. That might be the best linguistic situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina due to the ethnic make-up and history of war in the country. The name of the Bosnian language is denied by Bosnian Serbs and Croats, whose languages are named after their ethnicity. Consequently, Bosnian Serbs and Croats think that Bosnian Muslims, officially Bosniaks, should call their language Bosniak. They think Bosniaks are striving to call it “Bosnian” because this implies it is the language of all the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, regardless of ethnicity, and accuse them of pursuing a policy of “majorization,” whereby Bosniaks can dominate the country.
It is not only the Academy of Finland that concludes all three languages in Bosnia actually have one base and, “from the sociolinguistic point of view it is a unique example of a multi-standard language.” In all historical documents and travel books from before the Ottoman arrival in Bosnia -- during the rule of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, until the emergence of the poisoning nationalistic divisions that continue today -- the Bosnian language was not Bosniak, but Bosnian. It was spoken by Bosnian Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Jews. It was the third official language of the Ottoman Empire. Bartol Kasic, author of the first Croatian grammar book from the 16th century, noted that people in Bosnia were speaking Bosnian. The Bosnian poet Muhamed Hevai Uskufi is the author of the first Turkish-Bosnian dictionary, completed in 1632 and written in Arabic script. One of its four remaining copies is kept in Uppsala, Sweden. That dictionary was mentioned by Evliya Çelebi, the famous Ottoman writer from the 17th century. He noted that the people in Bosnia spoke a Bosnian that was similar to Latin. Austro-Hungarians, ruling Bosnia from 1878 to 1918, encouraged the official usage of Bosnian, but they switched to Serbo-Croatian under pressure from increasing Serb and Croat nationalism. This situation lasted throughout the monarchic and socialist Yugoslavia, until the Balkan wars of the 1990s. I feel that readers of this review agree with the parallel I drew between the linguistic situation in the Balkans and the Biblical confusion of tongues. Readers might be particularly confused by a religious group’s development of the language or languages spoken in four countries that emerged from the former Yugoslavia, and even more by the language disputes in Bosnia. To help these readers and myself as well, I shall quote Mirko Kovac, a celebrated Croat novelist, who says: “Foreigners have a better relationship than we do with our languages. They consider them as one language, which is what is most correct from the linguistic point of view. The state [Yugoslavia] fell to pieces, but not the language.” Bosnian writer Nenad Velickovic believes language should not be used as a marker of national identity, explaining, “In my opinion, that means adopting the ideology of nationalism -- something I despise.”
*Hajrudin Somun is the former ambassador of Bosnia and Herzegovina to Turkey and a lecturer of the history of diplomacy at Philip Noel-Baker International University in Sarajevo.
www.todayszaman.com/news-267452-confused-balkan-languages-by-hajrudin-somun*.html