Original scientific paper
We speak Croatian or’Croatian’: The standard dialect and language ideologies in institutional discourse
Anđel Starčević
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb
Abstract
Govorimo hrvatski [We speak Croatian] is a series of pre–recorded pieces of usage advice
broadcast on Croatia Radio One [Prvi program Hrvatskoga radija]. The series features professional
linguists and philologists who present language ’problems’, and ’advise’ listeners on how to
’improve’ their knowledge and production. This paper aims to answer three questions: 1) is
the approach based on scholarly research, 2) does the series propagate the ideology of the
standard language (Milroy 2001), and 3) can the series be uncritically used in Croatian language
teaching? The results show that the series promotes 1) linguistically unsubstantiated analyses, 2)
linguistic purism as a scholarly approach, 3) unnecessary rigidity regarding minimal variations,
4) stigmatization of language change, 5) the invisibility of non–standard varieties close to the
standard, 6) identifying the whole of the Croatian language with the standard dialect, and 7)
unrealistic, artificially construed problems. The results point to a strong presence of the ideology
of the standard language and to the conclusion that the approach of the series should radically
change in order to present students and other speakers with a more realistic portrayal of both
the Croatian standard dialect and the Croatian language as a whole.
Keywords
ideology of the standard language; multilingualism; non–standard varieties; prescriptivism; purism; Croatian language teaching; language and the mass media; linguistic activism
Hrčak ID:
161878
URI
Publication date:
15.7.2016.
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