Contents; Acknowledgements; 1 Introduction; 2 Serbo-Croatian: United or not we fall; 3 Serbian: Isn't my language your language?; 4 Montenegrin: A mountain out of a mole hill?; 5 Croatian: We are separate but equal twins; 6 Bosnian: A three-humped camel?; 7 Conclusion; Appendix A: Text of the 1850 Literary Agreement; Appendix B: Text of the 1954 Novi Sad Agreement; Works cited; Index
Summary
After Yugoslavia collapsed in 1991 Serbo-Croatian disintegrated. Using his first-hand observations before and after communism Robert Greenberg describes how the languages of Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, and Montenegro came into being and shows how their genesis reflects ethnic, religious, and political identity. - ;Language rifts in the Balkans are endemic and have long been both a symptom of ethnic animosity and a cause for inflaming it. But the break-up of the Serbo-Croatian language into four languages on the path towards mutual unintelligibility within a decade is, by any previous stan
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 175-182) and index