The book brings together many of the best known commentators and scholars who write about former Yugoslavia. The essays focus on the post-Yugoslav cultural transition and try to answer questions about what has been gained and what has been lost since the dissolution of the common country. Most of the contributions can be seen as current attempts to make sense of the past and help cultures in transition, as well as to report on them. The volume is a mixture of personal essays and scholarly articles and that combination of genres makes the book both moving and informative. Its importance is unique. While many studies dwell on the causes of the demise of Yugoslavia, this collection touches upon these causes but goes beyond them to identify Yugoslavia's legacy in a comprehensive way. It brings topics and writers, usually treated separately, into fruitful dialog with one another.
Do languages cause borders or do borders cause languages? This volume in the Current Issues in Language and Society series attempts to situate the debate on language policies in Southeastern Europe within the larger debate in social sciences and humanities on the issues of borders and the formation of national identities.
This book uses a specialized corpus of public language-related discourse to investigate links between language ideologies and ethnonationalism in contemporary West Central Balkans. Despite a century and a half of shared linguistic history, the nations making up the central part of former Yugoslavia continue to debate the ownership over the common language, creating much animosity, some legal issues, and often absurd circumstances. At the heart of the ongoing language debate over Central South Slavic is the belief in language as the cornerstone of ethnonational identity and the legitimacy of ethnic groups’ claims to sovereignty. Given a history of conflict and the recent resurgence in extreme ethnonationalism, an understanding of ethnolinguistic contestation in the region is as important as ever. This book will be of interest to social scientists working in fields as diverse as (applied) linguistics, anthropology, media studies, political science, sociology and history, as well as other scholars with an interest in language and society.
The "one-nation-one-language" assumption is as unrealistic as the well-known Chomskyan ideal of a homogeneous speech community. Linguistic pluricentricity is a common and widespread phenomenon; it can be understood as either differing national standards or differing local norms. The nine studies collected in this volume explore the sociocultural, conceptual and structural dimensions of variation and change within pluricentric languages, with specific emphasis on the relationship between national varieties. They include research undertaken in both the Cognitive Linguistic and socolinguistic tradition, with particular emphasis upon the emerging framework of Cognitive Sociolinguistics. Six languages, all more or less pluricentric, are analyzed: four Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch and Swedish) and two Romance languages (Portuguese and French). The volume describes patterns of phonetic, lexical and morphosyntactic variation, and perception and attitudes in relation to these pluricentric languages. It makes use of advanced empirical methods able to account for the complex interplay between conceptual and social aspects of pluricentric variation and other forms of language-internal variation.
This volume presents twelve in-depth case studies that critically examine the ways in which historical linguistics and language change interact with ideology. These varying interactions have been present since the birth of historical-comparative linguistics as a field of study. Work in historical linguistics may be appropriated or rejected for ideological reasons, most notably in the debates surrounding the Indo-European homeland; it can also by influenced by ideological biases, as in the 'alternative' histories that have been proposed for Moldovan and Maltese. The development of linguistically-defined nation states may itself fuel linguistic change, for instance through the suppression of minority languages or the division of existing languages to mirror political divisions, as occurred in the Balkans; or it may lead to the formulation of pseudo-histories designed to give a nation a more prestigious past. The book will be of interest not only to historical linguists but also to anthropologists, historians, and all those interested in language policy.
Discourse particles, discourse markers and pragmatic markers refer to phenomena that linguists have begun to probe only since the mid-1980s. Long-ignored in traditional linguistics and textbook grammars, and still relegated to marginal status in South Slavic, these linguistic phenomena have emerged as invaluable devices for cutting-edge theories of the semantics/pragmatics interface. This book, which is a pioneering study in such linguistic phenomena in South Slavic languages, is also among the first of its kind for a related group of languages. It builds on the recent findings of some of the most influential linguistically-oriented theories, such as Relevance Theory, Argumentation Theory and coherence-based approaches to explain the meaning and use of certain discourse/pragmatic particles/markers in Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian and Slovene. These particles/markers are part of the contemporary and historical lexicons of the South Slavic languages, varying across regions and time, but also differing in origin. This book, which draws from naturally occurring data, written media and constructed examples, aims at a wider audience including scholars working in semantics/pragmatics and Slavic languages, and applied specialists interested in this area of research. The authors hope that this book will be conceived as a starting point for a structured inquiry into the flourishing field of discourse particles in South Slavic.
The first edition of ELL (1993, Ron Asher, Editor) was hailed as "the field's standard reference work for a generation". Now the all-new second edition matches ELL's comprehensiveness and high quality, expanded for a new generation, while being the first encyclopedia to really exploit the multimedia potential of linguistics. * The most authoritative, up-to-date, comprehensive, and international reference source in its field * An entirely new work, with new editors, new authors, new topics and newly commissioned articles with a handful of classic articles * The first Encyclopedia to exploit the multimedia potential of linguistics through the online edition * Ground-breaking and International in scope and approach * Alphabetically arranged with extensive cross-referencing * Available in print and online, priced separately. The online version will include updates as subjects develop ELL2 includes: * c. 7,500,000 words * c. 11,000 pages * c. 3,000 articles * c. 1,500 figures: 130 halftones and 150 colour * Supplementary audio, video and text files online * c. 3,500 glossary definitions * c. 39,000 references * Extensive list of commonly used abbreviations * List of languages of the world (including information on no. of speakers, language family, etc.) * Approximately 700 biographical entries (now includes contemporary linguists) * 200 language maps in print and online Also available online via ScienceDirect – featuring extensive browsing, searching, and internal cross-referencing between articles in the work, plus dynamic linking to journal articles and abstract databases, making navigation flexible and easy. For more information, pricing options and availability visit www.info.sciencedirect.com. The first Encyclopedia to exploit the multimedia potential of linguistics Ground-breaking in scope - wider than any predecessor An invaluable resource for researchers, academics, students and professionals in the fields of: linguistics, anthropology, education, psychology, language acquisition, language pathology, cognitive science, sociology, the law, the media, medicine & computer science. The most authoritative, up-to-date, comprehensive, and international reference source in its field
Why did Yugoslavia fall apart? Was its violent demise inevitable? Did its population simply fall victim to the lure of nationalism? How did this multinational state survive for so long, and where do we situate the short life of Yugoslavia in the long history of Europe in the twentieth century? A History of Yugoslavia provides a concise, accessible, comprehensive synthesis of the political, cultural, social, and economic life of Yugoslavia—from its nineteenth-century South Slavic origins to the bloody demise of the multinational state of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Calic takes a fresh and innovative look at the colorful, multifaceted, and complex history of Yugoslavia, emphasizing major social, economic, and intellectual changes from the turn of the twentieth century and the transition to modern industrialized mass society. She traces the origins of ethnic, religious, and cultural divisions, applying the latest social science approaches, and drawing on the breadth of recent state-of-the-art literature, to present a balanced interpretation of events that takes into account the differing perceptions and interests of the actors involved. Uniquely, Calic frames the history of Yugoslavia for readers as an essentially open-ended process, undertaken from a variety of different regional perspectives with varied composite agenda. She shuns traditional, deterministic explanations that notorious Balkan hatreds or any other kind of exceptionalism are to blame for Yugoslavia’s demise, and along the way she highlights the agency of twentieth-century modern mass society in the politicization of differences. While analyzing nuanced political and social-economic processes, Calic describes the experiences and emotions of ordinary people in a vivid way. As a result, her groundbreaking work provides scholars and learned readers alike with an accessible, trenchant, and authoritative introduction to Yugoslavia's complex history.
Open publicationThe Languages and Linguistics of Europe: A Comprehensive Guide is part of the multi-volume reference work on the languages and linguistics of the continents of the world. The book supplies profiles of the language families of Europe, including the sign languages. It also discusses the areal typology, paying attention to the Standard Average European, Balkan, Baltic and Mediterranean convergence areas. Separate chapters deal with the old and new minority languages and with non-standard varieties. A major focus is language politics and policies, including discussions of the special status of English, the relation between language and the church, language and the school, and standardization. The history of European linguistics is another focus as is the history of multilingual European 'empires' and their dissolution. The volume is especially geared towards a graduate and advanced undergraduate readership. It has been designed such that it can be used, as a whole or in parts, as a textbook, the first of its kind, for graduate programmes with a focus on the linguistic (and linguistics) landscape of Europe.
