I will present how four research dimensions – speakers' attitudes, media coverage, methodology of orthographic codification, and socio-political context of Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian – can make a descriptive model of spelling reforms/changes in the 1990s and 2000s, providing better understanding of the phenomena of orthographic conflicts.
The language policy in the former Yugoslavia, with focus on Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian, has been discussed by many authors (e.g. Kačić 1997, Pranjković 2001, Tollefson 2002, Greenberg 2004, Young 2011, Langston & Peti-Stantić 2014), all of which agree that language has played a significant symbolic role in shaping the new national states. The process of standardization of these languages has been predominantly exemplified by changes in vocabulary in the 1990s. However, the state-of-the-art literature does not comparatively explore one more obvious symbol of language identity amongst South Slavs – orthographic norms. The process of creation or strengthening of the Yugoslav nation (and the 'Serbo-Croatian'/'Croato-Serbian' standard language) can be compared with the process of (or the attempts of) spelling unification in the 1880-1890s, 1929, 1950s and 1980s, some of which are still inadequately explored. Vice versa, the process of political independence of new national states can be correlated with the spelling reforms/changes in the 1990s and 2000s.
I will give an overview of the socio-political context of the spelling reforms/changes of Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian. Based on still unanswered questions related to spelling controversies, I will present a matching methodology for the description of development of orthographic policies, which will complement the contemporary research on spelling reforms/changes in European languages in the 1990s, most recently in Czech (Bermel 2007), Dutch (Jacobs 1997), German (Johnson 2005), and Portuguese (Garcez 1995).
A descriptive model of spelling conflicts aims to represent how four research dimensions – speakers' attitudes, media coverage, methodology of orthographic codification, and socio-political context – interact with one-another providing better understanding of the phenomena of orthographic reforms/changes and the origin of orthographic conflicts. The audience will be invited for a discussion about the survey questionnaire, a research that is planned to be conducted in 2020 in the above-mentioned countries.
