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UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 7th Annual International Postgraduate Conference

Inclusion Exclusion

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12:00 – 1:30: Panel A4: Sociolinguistics

Elena Morabito (University of California, Berkeley): ‘The expression of sociolinguistic boundaries through post-war Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian linguistic corpora’

During the existence of Yugoslavia, there were disputes pertaining to the official language “Serbo-Croatian” or “Croato-Serbian,” and since the state’s bloody breakup, three national “ethnic” languages have been declared: Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian (also called Bosniac).

Whereas the ethnic criterion is the one corresponding most closely to what people in the former Yugoslavia use officially, and what they fought wars about, it is not the only one or the completely agreed-upon criterion for the differences between the Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian languages. There are many intricacies to this issue: the question of what people speak who are not 100% “ethnically pure”, or who are not “geographically pure”: one example is Muslims outside Bosnia, and the complexity which arises when attempting to determine the language they speak. In addition, one does not necessarily need an ethnic designation in order to know what language he speaks: there are many former Yugoslavs who identify their language as “Serbo-Croatian,” even though it is currently a “dead language,” in the sense that the individual Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian languages have eclipsed it.

This paper contains a discussion of electronic corpora of the languages formerly known as Serbo-Croatian, and how their compositions relate to the problem of linguistic boundaries: there is a clear boundary between the states of Croatia, Serbia-Montenegro and Bosnia; however, the boundaries of the languages Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian are debatable, and very significant to the study of post-Yugoslav linguistic corpora. In this study it is shown how the motives of the corpus designers are reflected in the corpora themselves. Various theories and approaches to corpus compilation and construction are analyzed, as well as the intentions of those who use linguistic corpora for their own research dealing with the former Yugoslavia. Conclusions relate to the specific sociolinguistic problems presented by the various corpora, which need to be factored into linguistic analysis based on them.