Sussex R., Cubberley P. The Slavic Languages

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and vice versa. Since the Second World War, owing to the rapid

growth of the population and cultural prestige of Sofia, the western-

ized conversational speech of educated natives of the city has

gained increasing prestige and has come to be regarded by some

linguists as a (if not the) standard spoken variant of the literary

language.

(Scatton, 1993: 189–190)

2.2.3 Macedonian

As de Bray notes:

By an irony of history the people whose ancestors gave to the Slavs

their first literary language, were the last to have their modern

language recognized as a separate Slavic language, distinct from the

neighbouring Serbian and Bulgarian. (de Bray, 1980b: 137)

But this view is opposed by the Bulgarians, who also lay claim to the origins of

literacy among the Slavs. And Bosnian (2.2.4.3) has now become the newest Slavic

literary language to achieve national status.

The Macedonians identify the origins of their language with the cultural and

literary achievements of St. Clement and his followers, and especially the period of

the early eleventh century, when the Bulgarian–Macedonian state and church

were ruled from Ohrid by Samuilo (also Samuel or Samuil). But between the

twelfth and twentieth centuries Macedonian language and culture were almost

continuously subjugated to external religious and political pressures. The cultural

doldrums of five centuries of Ottoman rule, and of strongly authoritarian religious

control from the Greek Orthodox Church, caused a lack of continuity in

Macedonian culture and identity. During this period the Macedonians were most

sympathetic to the Bulgarians, partly on historical grounds, and partly for reasons

of religion: the Bulgarian Independent Church, which was established in 1870, had

jurisdiction over the Slav part of Macedonia, and the link between nation and

church was strong in 1890, as it had been a millennium before. In addition, Bulgaria

had a kind of geopolitical claim to political influence over Macedonia under the

short-lived treaty of San Stefano (1878).

However, when Macedonia was annexed by Bulgaria in 1941, as part of the

wartime break-up of Yugoslavia, the Macedonians found that the Bulgarians were

not sympathetic towards the idea of an independent Macedonia as a political or

cultural entity. Tito’s promise of an independent federated Macedonia within

the new Yugoslav state finally persuaded the Macedonians to ally themselves

2.2 South Slavic 69

politically and culturally with the new Yugoslavia, and to abandon their long-

standing Bulgarian affiliations. The Macedonian Church declared itself indepen-

dent in 1967. And the Macedonians have carefully differentiated their language

and culture from both Serbian and Bulgarian models, at least at the official level,

and assert the origins of their language from their own dialectal resources (a view

opposed by Bulgarian linguists):

Macedonian is structurally related to Bulgarian more than to any

other South Slavic languages. But the core of its standard was not

formed out of dialects or variants that had ever been covered by the

Bulgarian standard. Consequently, its autonomy could not have

resulted from a conscious distancing of a variant of a pluricentric

language. Like the other South Slavic standards, the Macedonian

standard was based on dialects which had never before been covered

by a standard.

(Tomic

, 1991: 449)

The contemporary standardization of Macedonian has nonetheless been aware of

the need to differentiate Macedonian from Bulgarian.

The period of Ottoman rule marks a low point in the national identity of the

Macedonians. When Macedonian finally did begin to re-emerge as an identifiable

cultural entity in southern Macedonia in the latter half of the nineteenth century,

its revival was based on folk songs and tales, which had escaped the influence

of the Greek Orthodox Church. A typical example of the period is Konstantin

Miladinov, who, in 1861, published a collection of 600 Macedonian folk lyrics and

epics, and who based his own original work on the language of this folk literature.

This language revival, centered on the southern dialects of Macedonia, provided

evidence of an ethnically identified folk culture. The close connection between folk

idioms and modern poetry is much in evidence in contemporary Macedonian

literature. On the other hand, the influence of Bulgarian is on the decline.

Bulgarian could have played a central role in the emergence of modern literary

Macedonian, had the Bulgarians been more sympathetic to proposals for a

composite Bulgarian–Macedonian literary language which were put forward by

various Macedonians in the latter part of the nineteenth century (a situation which

recalls the Slovak overtures to Czech rather earlier in the century: see 2.4.5–6). This

was a lost opportunity to create a pluricentric (2.5) South-East Slavic literary

language. The partitioning of Macedonia among the victorious Balkan states in

1913, and the subsequent suppression of Macedonian by all the occupying forces,

effectively united the Macedonians against all their overlords – including the

Bulgarians, with whom the Macedonians historically had the closest cultural and

linguistic ties.

70 2. Socio-historical evolution

The Macedonian language achieved official recognition only relatively recently,

at the Second Session of the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of

Yugoslavia, on 29 September 1943. The Macedonians joined the Yugoslav

Federation as a separate republic with their own language and literature in 1944.

The language which became Contemporary Standard Macedonian was based not

on the southern dialects of the Miladinov folk materials, but on the area around

Skopje. And it drew its concept and definition of national identity and nationhood

to a significant extent from Za makedonskite raboti (On Macedonian affairs)by

Krste Misirkov, a work which, though suppressed shortly after its publication in

1903, argued for the geopolitical–cultural autonomy of Macedonia. Although this

work acted as a statement of policy, Macedonian remains very much an ausbau

language (11.2.1), rebuilt recently on a dialect base and consciously differentiated

especially from Bulgarian.

Nonetheless, as Hill describes it, the situation of Macedonia within the federative

state of Yugoslavia was in an important sense indeterminate, since it did not

‘represent either a political, ethnic or linguistic unit’ (Hill, 1982: 47). The problem

was not with the political status of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia but

rather with the misfit between the geographical territory of this entity and the

Macedonian speaking territory, which spreads into Albania, Greece and Bulgaria.

This situation has not been resolved by the formation of the autonomous state of

Macedonia, or ‘‘Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM)’’, after the

political dismemberment of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Since 1945 much attention has been paid to codifying Macedonian orthography,

grammar and lexis (though there is still no complete monolingual defining

dictionary of the language), and to completing a linguistic description of the

Macedonian literary language. In spite of all this, the Bulgarian Writers’ Union

still does not acknowledge the existence of a Macedonian language, which they

regard as a western dialect of Bulgarian. The growth of a national linguistic

consciousness, reinforced by educational and legislative authority, should make

Macedonian progressively less like Bulgarian in the years to come. The promotion

of a unified Macedonian language, however, is not helped by the geographical

dispersion of its speakers, and there are substantial minorities of Serbs, Albanians

and Bulgarians in FYR Macedonia. In addition, significant e

migre

communities of

Macedonians are to be found in Greece, Bulgaria, North America and Australasia.

Contemporary Macedonia is autonomous, though under pressure from Greece

and Bulgaria in establishing its political, economic, cultural and linguistic auto-

nomy. While the standing of the language is reinforced by political independence,

Greece opposes the use of ‘‘Macedonia(n)’’ for the country or the language on

historical grounds.

2.2 South Slavic 71

2.2.4 Serbo-Croatian, Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian

2.2.4.1 Orthodoxy and Serbian

Among the Orthodox believers the dominating partner was Serbia, with

Montenegro and Bosnia-Hercegovina playing a relatively less important role.

Montenegro has a special place in the history of language among the South

Slavs, since it was here that some of the first books in Cyrillic were printed in

1493. The Serbs, who were religiously more homogeneous, were converted to

Byzantine Christianity in 871–875. Their early history was marked mainly by

resistance to Bulgarian influence in the east and south, but the Nemanja dynasty

(1169–1331) established the medieval Kingdom of Serbia, together with a consider-

able flourishing of literature and the arts. The Christians, however, were defeated at

Kosovo in 1389, and Serbia remained under Turkish control until the late nine-

teenth century. Many Serbs fled west into Bosnia, Dalmatia and Montenegro, or

north to Vojvodina and even into Hungary. Those who stayed behind found a

linguistic and national rallying-point in the Serbian Orthodox Church. But the

material conditions of life in Vojvodina and in Hungary were such that Serbian

culture prospered there more than in Serbia proper. The first Serbian literary

society was founded in Budapest, and many important figures of Serbian culture,

like the poet Jovanovic

and the educator and publicist Dositej Obradovic

, were

Hungarian-born Serbs.

From the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and especially from the eighteenth

century onwards, the Russian element in Serbian culture becomes more clearly

discernible, as Russia emerges as defender of the Orthodox faith and as the focus of

Orthodox Slavic culture. The Russian recension of Church Slavonic was adopted

and adapted for Serbian use. The Serbian language, however, still lacked a political

base, which did not come until the formation of the new Serbian Kingdom follow-

ing the Kara George uprising (1804–1813). This served to focus the national,

cultural and linguistic aspirations of Serbs all through the Balkans and in

Hungary. And it led to the growth of pan-Slav sentiment, which the Habsburg

empire moved to suppress. Serbia was eventually freed from Turkish control by the

Treaty of Berlin in 1878. The success of Serbia in the Balkan Wars in 1912–1913

had the effect of uniting the Serbs, and of drawing non-Serbian states into a closer

union which eventually emerged as Yugoslavia after the First World War.

The establishment of the Serbian state in 1817 was closely linked to a rise in

Serbian national and linguistic sentiment. Written Serbian was not effectively

standardized. The Cyrillic alphabet was used in its Old Church Slavonic form,

which was not well suited to Serbian. The standard idiom was a ‘‘Slavic-Serbian’’

hybrid (Unbegaun, 1935; Albin, 1970), produced by mixing Russian Church

72 2. Socio-historical evolution

Slavonic with Serbian. And the profusion of regional dialects made the spoken

language different from what was written. The rallying cry of the new Romantic

movement was ‘‘Pis

i kako govoris

, govori kako pis

!’’ (Write as you speak, and

speak as you write!), in the words of Vuk Karadzˇ ic

, which recalls the views of the

Slovene Kopitar (2.2.5). Vuk’s earlier linguistic work, including a Serbian diction-

ary, was strongly influenced by the need to find a dialect able to act as a focal point

for a new, more widely accepted, literary language. Slavic-Serbian was unsuitable,

lacking either a recognized standard or a general consensus. Vuk’s intention was to

identify and promote a single dialect which, written in a fairly phonetic script, could

act as a focal point for the linguistic sentiment of both the Serbs and the Croats.

The reforms of Vuk (for Serbian) and Gaj (for Croatian) worked in close parallel.

They agreed that the dialect of East Hercegovina – the je- version of the s

to dialect,

or ‘‘s

tokavian’’ (10.2.2), a central and fairly neutral variant, albeit from the Serbian

area – would be the national standard. Vuk reformed Cyrillic by adding new letters

and discarding unnecessary ones (appendix B). Gaj’s modifications in the Roman

alphabet made Serbian Cyrillic and Croatian Roman match almost symbol-for-

symbol. The lexis of the new language was purged of many of the Church Slavonic

elements which had been so confusingly prevalent in Slavic-Serbian. These reforms

achieved national status in the Vienna Literary Agreement (‘‘Bec

ki dogovor’’ or

‘‘Knjizˇ evni dogovor’’) of 1850, attended by the major Serbian and Croatian

specialists of their day. Serbia had used Serbian as an official language since

1814, and Montenegro even earlier. The unified Serbo-Croatian language did

much over the remainder of the nineteenth century to prepare the way for the

broader unification of the Yugoslav states.

Nonetheless, the status of Serbian and Croatian vis-a

-vis Serbo-Croatian (as it

was) or B/C/S (as it is) remains a vexed issue today, both in former Yugoslavia and

among the e

migre

populations of Yugoslavs abroad. There were many Serbs and

Croats who denied that Serbo-Croatian existed at all, except as a fiction to unite

what they regarded not as variants but as two languages – Serbian and Croatian.

Serbo-Croatian has now – since the dissolution of Yugoslavia – divided into three

culturally and politically defined languages: Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. The

dual status of Serbian and Croatian in Serbo-Croatian was unusual, though not

unique; in some respects it resembles the Hindi–Urdu relationship in modern

India and Pakistan. In the Yugoslavian case, although the Hercegovinian basis of

Serbo-Croatian remained, there were two parallel norms of the standard language,

centred on Zagreb (Croatian) and Belgrade (B/C/S Beo

grad ) (Serbian). At the time

of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, there was still no single authoritative grammar or

dictionary of the unified language covering both variants. Apart from some differ-

ences of phonology, morphology and syntax (10.3.), there was also a tendency

2.2 South Slavic 73

for lexical borrowings to differ in policy. Borrowings in the Serbian variant

often correspond to calques or Slavic creations in Croatian: Serb mu

zika ‘music’

corresponds to Cr gla

zba, and Serb bibliote

ka ‘library’ to Cr knj ı``zˇnica.

Naylor, writing in 1980, observed that ‘‘the linguistic differences between the two

variants are no greater than those between British and American English and

would not justify separating them into two separate languages’’ (1980: 68). This

linguistic judgment has been overtaken by history, and it is difficult to conceive of a

set of circumstances which would reunite Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian.

2.2.4.2 Catholicism and Croatian

The dominant group among the Catholics has been the Croats; the Dalmatians, in

spite of a cultural flowering in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, became

increasingly identified with Croatian political and linguistic nationalism from the

nineteenth century. The national idea of an independent Croatia dates from about

AD 924, when Tomislav led the Croats to freedom from Byzantium. From the late

eleventh century until the Battle of Moha

cs in 1526, however, the Croats were

under Hungarian rule, which was followed by 250 years of Turkish domination. In

1790, with the Turks already off Croatian territory, the Croatian Diet formally

chose a form of alliance with Hungary, which lasted until the First World War. The

language situation in Croatia was characterized by the dominant Hungarian

influence. Latin was the official written language. Croatian Church Slavonic was

widely used for religious purposes parallel to Latin, and was written in the

Glagolitic script (appendix B) until the Renaissance, and increasingly in the

Roman script afterwards. These Roman scripts, some of them even based on

Hungarian orthography, covered many varieties of Slavic from Church Slavonic

to local dialects. But they were ill-coordinated, and there was no consensus about

which dialect should be used for official purposes. These difficulties were brought

to a head by the growing feelings of Croatian nationalism and pan-Slavism at the

time of the Illyrian Province (1809–1814; 2.2.5). During the early part of the

nineteenth century, indeed, writers on Croatian often referred to the ‘‘Illyrian’’

language, and there was a widespread feeling that the South Slavs, excluding

Bulgaria, were part of one single language culture. This new national spirit was

expressed by the poet and publicist Ljudevit Gaj, a Romantic nationalist in the

pattern of the Czech and Polish revivals. His work on orthographic reform, based

largely on the Czech model, using diacritics, led to standardized orthographies for

both Croatian and Slovenian.

The language question, indeed, sparked off one of the bitterest political conflicts

of the nineteenth century. Croatian, Hungarian and German were all widely

spoken in Croatia at the time, and Latin was still used as the official language in

74 2. Socio-historical evolution

Hungary and Croatia in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1846 the

Hungarians finally succeeded in having Hungarian, not German, accepted as the

official language, and they tried to impose this solution on Croatia. In the short term

the Croats lost this particular battle, since both the Hungarians and the Austrians

proved unsympathetic to the establishment of the Croatian language as an official

medium. In the longer term, however, this episode gave the Croats an awareness of

their language-culture which added an important impetus to their political claims

for autonomy, and led indirectly to the united Serbia-Croatia after 1918.

The polarization into Serb vs Croat culture was of long standing, and had strong

religious bases in the opposition of Orthodoxy and Catholicism. It was emphasized

by the growing use of Croatian in secondary and tertiary education throughout the

nineteenth century – for example, in the Academy of Art and Science (1867–) and

the University of Zagreb (1874–). However, the official union of Croatian and

Serbian into Serbo-Croatian was enshrined in the Vienna Literary Agreement of

1850 (2.2.4.1). This agreement helped both Croats and Serbs to overcome narrow

nationalistic outlooks and to aim for a broader cooperation in politics and culture.

The year 1850 did not, however, signal the end of the tension between Serbian and

Croatian, which became the two major variants of the new literary language. The

theoretically neutral Serbo-Croatian stood between and above them, with two

alphabets (Roman for the Croats, and Cyrillic for the Serbs) and agreed differences

in phonology, grammar and lexis. This underlying dichotomy was both a dynamic

and a difficult factor in the fate of Serbo-Croatian. The fact that the national

standard was based on a Serbian dialect had been a source of irritation to the

Croats, who had tended to promote Croatian, rather than the Croatian variant of

Serbo-Croatian, in the Croatian Republic. In 1967 there appeared a unilateral

Croatian declaration proclaiming the autonomous status of the ‘‘Croatian literary

language’’. This position was actively supported by many Croatians, especially

abroad. The Serbs remained more faithful to the notion of a Serbo-Croatian

language: Serbo-Croatian, after all, was based on a Serbian dialect. This linguistic

separatism has waxed more strongly whenever political and ethnic tensions

between the Serbs and the Croats have been exacerbated, for example during the

Yugoslav political crisis of 1991. The two languages are now officially separated.

2.2.4.3 Islam and Bosnian

Bosnia’s history has been influenced primarily by its religious and ethnic diversity.

Bosnia – which consists of two regions, Bosnia in the north and Hercegovina in the

south – fell to the Turks in 1463, and many Bosnian noblemen became Muslims.

The Arabic script was used to write Bosnian Islamic literature until at least the late

nineteenth century (Ivic

, 1986: 155). Bosnia nevertheless remained linguistically

2.2 South Slavic 75

close to Serbian, and until its autonomy in 1992 Bosnian was seen as a dialectal area

of Serbo-Croatian. Its population was predominantly Muslim, a feature it shares

with Kosovo, dating from the 500 years of Turkish occupation of the Balkans.

During the Tito period the Bosnian Muslims were given the new ‘‘ethnic’’ name

Muslimani (having previously been simply Serbs or Croats of Islamic faith), but this

name has now been dropped in the new state, replaced by Bo



aci (Eng Bosniaks).

The Hercegovinian dialect was the one chosen for the standard of Serbo-Croatian.

The current population by ethnic group splits into Bosnian (44 percent), Serb

(31 percent), Croat (17 percent) and ‘‘other’’ (7 percent), and by religion into Islam

(43 percent), Orthodox (30 percent), Catholic (18 percent) and ‘‘other’’ (9 percent).

Contemporary Bosnia has an unusual and difficult political structure, and following

the Dayton Accords of 1995 consists of the Federation of Bosnia and Hercegovina,

and Republika Srpska (‘‘Republic of Srpska’’), covering almost half of Bosnia, to

accommodate the Serbian population. The script of Republika Srpska is Cyrillic, its

base ekavian/jekavian (Constitution, Article 7), and its orientation is towards Serbia

and Belgrade, with 90 percent of the population claiming Serbian allegiance. The

remainder of Bosnia is under the new Bosnian government, uses the Roman script,

and is developing a new language definition which is still emerging in instruments

like dictionaries (Benson, 1998; Uzicanin, 1995).

Modern Bosnian is closest to Croatian, not the least in its use of Roman rather

than Cyrillic. In lexis there are clear Turkish admixtures reflecting both historical

and cultural realities (2.2.2). The status of the Bosnian language is increasingly

recognized by bodies like the United Nations, UNESCO, and translation and

interpreting accreditation agencies.

The website of the Bosnian Embassy in Washington offers two language choices:

English; and what it calls ‘‘B/S/H’’, or ‘‘Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian (Hrvatski)’’ a

single text in Roman script. This recognition of a multilingual, multicultural and

potentially pluricentric status quo is unusual, and unlike the single-language focus

which has dominated the states emerging from the former Yugoslavia as it fell

apart. Whether this will work linguistically and culturally, as well as politically and

economically, remains to be seen.

2.2.5 Slovenian

The Slovenes’ history, in comparison with that of Serbia, Croatia and Macedonia,

has been comparatively peaceful, but also lower key. The Slovenes have been

Catholic since the eighth century. Partly because of their relatively small popula-

tion, they have been almost continuously under the control of Rome or the

Habsburgs, and have enjoyed a moderate level of material prosperity. Perhaps

76 2. Socio-historical evolution

for these reasons they have tended to avoid armed insurrection and political revolt,

and so have managed to escape political and cultural destruction. In modern times

most of the Slovenes live in four major areas in the north-west of former

Yugoslavia (Carniola, Styria, Primorska, Prekmurje), and in adjacent areas of

Austria and Hungary (Carinthia) and Italy (Venetian Slovenia). About 300,000

Slovenes live abroad, principally in North America.

Slovenian illustrates the difficulty of establishing a written language in a political

context with insufficient administrative and educational support and cultural

continuity. German-Slovenian diglossia, which has been standard for centuries in

Slovenia, has itself helped to retard the emergence of a fully autonomous and

articulated Slovenian literary language.

Typically of the ‘‘smaller’’ Slavic languages, the emergence of the Slovenian

nation is closely connected with factors of language and culture. The Slovenes

were united more by their wish to define their identity apart from the German

world than by a wider pan-Slav or Yugoslav sentiment, which became part of

Slovene national consciousness only in relatively recent times. Apart from brief

periods of allegiance to the Slavic kingdoms of Samo (627–658) and Otakar II

(1253–1278), the Slovenes were subject to non-Slavic political rule, and to the

religious domination of Rome, from their conversion in 748 until 1945. After

1278 they passed from the control of the Holy Roman Empire into that of the

Habsburgs. From the fourteenth century the official policy was one of

Germanization and colonization at the expense of Slovenian language and culture.

The official languages were Latin, German and Italian, the latter two spoken by the

nobility and the middle classes, while the peasantry spoke Slovenian. The

Reformation, however, led to a sudden increase in Slovenian linguistic and cultural

nationalism. Protestantism was widely accepted in the churches and schools. This

religious revolution was accompanied by a spontaneous popular surge of activity in

the Slovenian language, symbolized by Primozˇ Trubar, who translated the New

Testament into Slovenian and produced a series of hymns and other religious

works which were read, admired and imitated by writers like Jurij Dalmatin, the

translator of the Old Testament (1584). There was now a model for the Slovenian

literary language, supported by the grammar of Bohoric

(1584), based on the

Lower Carniolan (Dolenjsko) dialect of Trubar and Dalmatin, from the area to

the south of Ljubljana. The later admixture of elements from the Gorenjsko dialect

of Ljubljana represented an addition rather than a major revision, and in many

respects this sixteenth-century idiom remained the principal model for the later

development of literary Slovenian.

The Counter-Reformation of the seventeenth century, however, interrupted

the nascent national Slovenian language-culture. Slovenian books were burned,

2.2 South Slavic 77

and dissidents persecuted. This anti-Slovenian attitude persisted until the

Napoleonic Wars, when Slovenia, like many other ‘‘smaller’’ language-cultures,

was caught up in the wave of nationalism which swept Europe. Napoleon’s plans

included the establishment of the Province of Illyria (1809–1814), which was

designed to provide a home for the unification of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs.

This potential framework for Slovene nationalism was also a spur to pan-

Slavic sentiment. In its more local form this idea, which survived even after the

fall of Napoleon, included the absorption of Slovenian into Serbian-Croatian

(not yet Serbo-Croatian!), also known as the ‘‘Illyrian language’’ (Iovine, 1984).

In its wider form, for instance in the writings of the Slovak poet and scholar

Kolla

r, there would be four principal ‘‘dialects’’ of Slavic – Polish, Russian,

Czech and Illyrian – unified within a transnational concept of Slavdom. The

Illyrian plan could have been a mixed blessing for the Slovenes, since their

language could easily have been overshadowed by the numerically and historically

stronger Serbian-Croatian axis. But Slovenian escaped this fate, thanks mainly

to the union of Serbian and Croatian in 1850, which excluded Slovenian

and rendered the Illyrian concept irrelevant, and confirmed Thomson’s observa-

tion of the tendency of the Slavs to increasing diversification, rather than

unification (2.1.1).

The Slovenes were left to work out the shape of their own revived literary

language. There were vital contributions from men like Valentin Vodnik, a writer,

teacher, publicist, grammarian and lexicographer; Pres

eren, a poet of international

standing; and Kopitar, an influential Slavic philologist, author of the first full

descriptive grammar of Slovenian and promoter of an all-Slovenian language

(1809). The key problem was the familiar issue of established literary norms versus

the claims of the principal dialects. The Reformation model of literary Slovenian

was prestigious and supported by major written texts. But it was increasingly

distant from spoken Slovenian, whose dialects had continued to evolve and

diverge. This made it difficult for those shaping the new Slovenian language to

reconcile it with the popular nineteenth-century trend towards more phonetic

orthographies and vernacular-oriented literary languages, a position advocated

by Kopitar and opposed by Pres

eren’s view of a reasonable compromise of histo-

rical and contemporary spoken Slovenian, as well as of Slovenian and foreign

(especially German) elements (Herrity, 1985). The controversy between the ‘‘his-

torical’’ and the ‘‘vernacular’’ camps was finally resolved in what Stankiewicz

(1980: 101) calls a ‘‘modern historicism’’. Modern literary Slovenian is, like

Bulgarian, a dialectal artefact, an abstraction not naturally occurring in the dialect

base of the language. It is a ‘more or less abstract platform to secure the linguistic

unification of the language’ (Lencek, 1982: 284).

78 2. Socio-historical evolution