How European is Serbo-Croatian?
Abstract
The states of the former Yugoslavia are, one-by-one, joining the European Union. The question arises: to what degree can the Serbo-Croatian language be seen as a “European language”, from a linguistic point of view. The Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian “languages” are seen as variants of one ethnic language, with only limited differences. New linguistic models of the “language union Europe” (Ekkehard König; Martin Haspelmath) treat the Serbo-Croatian language as a member of the “Standard Average European”. Recent models of the SAE say that 65 % of the linguistic structure of Serbo-Croatian is “European”. Some linguistic features (“Balcanisms”) can be seen as “non-European”, in the sense of SAE. A final answer to the question of the Europeanness of the Serbo-Croatian language will depend on which model of “European linguistic union” is applied.
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