Filologija, No. 78, 2022.
Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.21857/mwo1vc3xoy
Discussed Topics and the Conclusions of the Council for the Norm of the Croatian Standard Language
Mislav Ježić
Abstract
Our Board for the Norm of the Croatian Standard Language inherits the decisions and recommendations of the Council for the Norm of the Croatian Standard Language, headed by Radoslav Katičić from 2005 to 2012. That is what we confirmed in our first public declaration. As the Deputy Head of the Council for the Norm, I would like to present the main topics and methods of the discussions and decisions of the Council. The Council debated the following groups of topics on its 27 sessions:
Attitude of the Croatian language community to its language. Relations between the contemporary Croatian standard language, its literary tradition and its dialects. The course of the development of the literary language.
Open questions of Croatian orthography.
Questions of the phonological and orthographical norm, of the morphological, syntactical and lexical norm.
Use of foreign words in Croatian. Writing of foreign names. Development of Croatian terminology.
On the ‘dialectal basis’ of the Croatian literary language, a distorted picture of the Croatian literary language. On the Church-Slavonic literacy and the dialectal stylization of the Croatian literary language.
The concepts of the literary and standard language. Standard and collo-
quial language.
Language change and language development in respect of literary or standard language and in respect of natural language idioms, dialects and colloquial language.
The Council discussed some social and ideological questions concerning language: the rights of consumers in using their language, or the questions concerning the gender equality in language.
With regard to political topics, the Council debated on the proposal of the Act on the public use of the Croatian language, and on the future position of Croatian in the European Union.
In this paper, it is considered very important to shed light on the basic principles of debates on orthographical, grammatical and lexical questions, which were followed by the Council for the Norm. They can be overlooked if we are focused exclusively on single particular questions. These principles are essential for a further progress in the standardization of Croatian language.
However, it is most important to draw attention to some crucial questions from the linguistic and cognitive point of view. These questions are those marked with numbers 1, 5 and 7. From these topics we can best see the broad and comprehensive perspective in the frame of which the Council formulated the general premises wherefrom it coherently derived all its more particular or specific conclusions.
Keywords
Croatian literary or standard language; orthographical, grammatical and lexical norm; general validity of rules; literary language tradition, dialects; dialectal basis or stylization of a literary language; language change and language development
Hrčak ID:
281896
URI
Publication date:
13.9.2022.
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