Brotherhood and Unity: Language and Language Politics in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945-1991)

Abstract

A constant reminder of unresolved national problems, the issue of the Serbo-Croatian language and of the creation of a standard language presented itself in various forms in both the first Yugoslavia, a centralized and monarchic country, and the second one, a socialist and federal country. In the effort to produce a viable standard language, the Central Committee of the Communist League had to officially address this issue on several occasions, making decisions that more than once turned out to be contradictory and harbingers of further complications. This essay investigates the linguistic policies adopted in Tito’s Yugoslavia from its constitutive act (Jajce 1943) to 1991, year of Yugoslavia’ s breakup. While the socialist state in many ways followed a leading- edge policy with regard to the linguistic minorities, the issue of a federal language itself and of its variants, by contrast, remained an open question, revelatory of the difficulties to strike a precarious and ultimately impossible balance between unitarism and separatism. The failure to agree upon a name identifying a shared federal language bespeaks of the disintegrating tendencies that in the following years would eventually make Yugoslavia collapse.