Original scientific paper
Ljudevit Jonke and Yugoslav Language Unitarianism
Nataša Bašić
Abstract
The article discusses Ljudevit Jonke’s attitude toward Yugoslav language unitarianism as the expression of the language policy based on Serbocroatistic foundations. The object of this policy is the abstract Serbo-Croatian language model and the attempts to establish it as the official state language in the Yugoslav multinational language community through forcible fusion of several languages with histories of their own – Croatian, Serbian and Slovenian in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and Croatian and Serbian in the socialist Yugoslavia. The attempts to create a dictionary of the common language and to introduce common professional and scientific terminology failed, and the orthography produced in 1960 was renounced by the Croatian side in 1971, together with the Novi Sad Agreement on which this orthography was founded. Jonke criticizes the principles of the Yugoslav unitarian politics that has, eventually, introduced the Serbian language to replace the never fully realized Serbo-Croatian as an abstract label. Through structural analysis of organic idioms and standard languages, he separates Croatian from the Serbian language and interprets Croatian as a historical language that has, through centuries of its independent development, realized its standard on the linguistic (phonological, morphological and lexicological) and orthographic levels, and this standard, as general cultural good, can not and must not be changed. Jonke based his viewpoints partially on the postulates of the Prague School, and partially on the results of the Croatistic research works performed by previous generations of Croatian linguists (Antun Radic, Blaž Jurišic, Petar Guberina, Kruno Krstic).
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
45971
URI
Publication date:
1.12.2007.
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