Sussex R., Cubberley P. The Slavic Languages

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westwards into Bohemia, where the Benedictine Abbey of Sa

zava produced some

hagiography, the Prague Fragments (eleventh to twelfth century, one of the earliest

extant Slavic manuscripts), and the thirteenth-century hymn ‘Hospodine, pomiluj ny’

(Lord, have mercy upon us) – all of which represented the Old Czech version of

Church Slavonic, in the tradition of Constantine and Methodius (Weingart, 1949).

The emergence of the strong Pr

emysl dynasty in Bohemia, and the Golden Age

which it ushered in, made Bohemia partly independent from the politics of the

neighboring European powers, and for a time an exception to Bismarck’s famous

dictum, expressed many years later, that he who controls Bohemia controls

Europe. Under the Pr

emysl (–1306) and Luxemburg (1310–1439) dynasties,

Bohemia grew in territory, wealth, and political and religious independence.

Charles IV (r. 1342–1378) did much to make Prague (Cz Praha) a commercial

and intellectual centre. He founded the Charles University in Prague (1348) – soon

to become a centre of political and religious nationalism, and encouraged the arts

and architecture. The Czech manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries

began with Czech glosses included in Latin manuscripts and culminated in a

complete translation of the Bible, and in hymns, carols and hagiography.

Hussitism gave Bohemia a pre-eminent intellectual position in Europe. Jan Hus

(1369–1415) had a fundamental influence on Czech and Slovak orthography as well

as on language and religious dogma and practice. The Hussite movement was

prompted by the reforms proposed by Wyclif in England. But in Bohemia it

achieved the momentum of a spontaneous national mass movement with a clear

religious dimension. Hus opposed the doctrines which excluded the laity from

actively taking part in worship, and in their place he proposed the free preaching

of the gospels in the vernacular. He encouraged the spread of literacy by the

increased reading of the Bible and religious literature, and the use of hymns. And

he attempted to make the written Czech language closer to the vernacular.

The installation of the Habsburgs in Bohemia (1526) consolidated the position of

Prague as a commercial and intellectual centre. German printing techniques gave

an outlet to the cultural activities of the Czech Reformation: the first grammars of

Czech, and especially the so-called Kralice Bible (1579–1594), which was produced

by a Protestant group. The Kralice Bible appeared within a few years of the Luther

and King James Bibles, but was more conservative than its German and English

counterparts in its approach to the vernacular. The impetus of this creative activity

sparked a wave of linguistic nationalism, which reached a new anti-German peak in

1615 when the Estates decreed that

All children in Bohemia, of native or foreign-born parentage, should

learn Czech, and that only those children who spoke Czech could

2.4 West Slavic 99

inherit land or immovables of a deceased landholder. Thereafter no

foreigner who did not know Czech could become a citizen of any town

in the Kingdom. (Thomson, 1953: 147)

Furthermore, religious dissension between the increasing number of factions, and

the growth of militant Protestantism among the Czech nobles, led to increasing

friction between them and the Catholic Habsburgs. In 1620 the Bohemian forces

were defeated at White Mountain (Bı

Hora). The ensuing Thirty Years’ War and

its aftermath saw the enserfment of the Slavic agricultural class, and the destruction

of the Bohemian nobility, Protestantism, writing, free speech, nationalism and

material prosperity. The Catholic Counter-Reformation suppressed and exiled

Protestants and unorthodox Catholics, together with the best Czech writers – like

the writer-educator Komensky´ (Comenius, 1592–1660). In 1662 the Jesuits com-

pleted their domination of the education system by taking over control of the

Charles University, a situation which lasted until the expulsion of the Jesuits in

1773. The prospects for the Czech language were not promising, and Bohemia

entered a period of Germanization which was only relieved by the emergence of

Romantic nationalism, and the rebirth of religious tolerance, towards the end

of the eighteenth century.

The resurgence of Czech was directly related to the German Romantic concept of

language-nation, and directly opposed to the spirit and practice of Metternich’s

internal policies. Among the stateless Slavs of Eastern Europe this notion of

language-nation was vital in reasserting the legitimacy and standing of the various

Slav tongues. The first problem was one of codification and standardization, which

required grammars, dictionaries and official recognition. Czech had already been

well served by its grammatical tradition, even during the period of cultural eclipse;

and Dobrovsky´ ’s Ausfu

hrliches Lehrgeba

ude der bo

hmischen Sprache (1809) was a

landmark in the rehabilitation of literary Czech – not the least in explicitly recog-

nizing the tradition of the Kralice Bible, which helped to create the diglossic

situation of modern written Literary Czech, which is clearly distinct from educated

Czech speech. Dobrovsky´ ’s grammar was supported by further historical, philo-

logical and lexicographical works, by Jungmann’s dictionary, by historical studies

showing the authentic historicity of Czech culture and language by scholars like

Palacky´ , by an original literature (for instance, in the work of the poet Ma

cha), and

by a rapid increase in translating, and the expansion of the teaching of Czech into

state schools.

Jungmann’s influence was crucial in developing the lexical resources of Czech.

Nearly two centuries of German domination had left literary Czech in a lexically

impoverished and confused state. The nineteenth-century Czechs adopted a polity

100 2. Socio-historical evolution

of re-Slavicizing their lexis, confirming and creating a consistently Slavic voca-

bulary by reviving Czech and dialectal-Czech words, or adapting Slavic roots, at

the expense of ‘‘internationalisms’’ derived from Greek, Germanic and Romance (like

Croatian, see 2.2.4). So we have Czech hudba, but Russian mu

zyka, Polish muzyka

‘music’; and Czech knihovna, but Russian bibliote

ka, Polish biblioteka ‘library’.

There were also some important achievements of a more institutional nature.

A Chair of Czech Language was established at the Charles University in 1791. But

the leading Czech intellectuals, sensing that Vienna would keep close control over the

university, wisely diversified their efforts, and set up the Museum of the Bohemian

Kingdom (1818) and Matice c

eska

(1830), which was entrusted with the propaga-

tion of the Czech language. The vocabulary of Czech expanded rapidly with its

increasing use in intellectual spheres, stimulated by the desire of Czech intellectuals

and writers to show that their language was a worthy vehicle of intellectual and

literary activity. As Bradley (1971) observes, this cultural nationalism was primar-

ily concerned with establishing linguistic equality with German. The political

element arrived later, with the growth of pan-Slavism, and the new contact with

Slovak nationalists. By the early nineteenth century Prague had already become the

intellectual centre of the Western Slavic world. The Charles University was sepa-

rated as a Czech university in 1882 from the newly created German University of

Prague. Czech schools, media and the arts grew rapidly. The nineteenth-century

Czech revival had a high degree of national self-consciousness. Nevertheless, it

took the First World War, and the emergence of leaders like Masaryk and Benes

,to

promote the Czechs to nationhood. The Slovaks joined with Bohemia and Moravia

in 1918 to form the new Czechoslovak state. Czech and Slovak became official

co-variants of the ‘‘Czechoslovak language’’, a situation which has survived the

Second World War and the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948.

The Czech Republic, comprising Bohemia and Moravia, was separated from

Slovakia to form the Czech Republic in 1992. The effect of this change on the Czech

language is likely to be minor.

Lachian (or Lakhian), a Czech dialect sometimes claimed as a language, is

discussed in 10.4.3.

2.4.6 Slovak

The history of Slovak is very different from that of Czech. Much of it consists of the

Slovaks’ efforts to lever their language away from Czech, and to establish it on a

viable independent basis.

The Slovaks were separated from the Czechs by the Hungarian capture of Great

Moravia around

AD 900, and until 1918 they had no official ethnic or linguistic

2.4 West Slavic 101

standing. They were traditionally an agricultural people, subordinate to the

Magyar majority of the Hungarian Kingdom. Until the end of the eighteenth

century their spoken language had only the status of a regional vernacular, and

until the end of the nineteenth century their written language, when it was not

Latin, Hungarian or German, was predominantly Czech.

Slovak is not clearly visible in linguistic terms until the seventeenth century, and

its emergence as a national language is a feature more of the Counter-Reformation

than of the Reformation. During the Hussite movement the majority of Slovaks

became Protestants and followed the Czechs in using the Kralice Bible. This Bible

language (‘‘biblic

tina’’) was preserved by the Protestants even through the

Counter-Reformation, when they were reduced to an isolated minority, and was

an important factor binding the Slovak Protestants to the Czech language and to

Czech-Slovak unification during the following centuries.

Slovak is an exception to the generalization that Protestant religions were asso-

ciated with local vernacular movements and the church in the development of

literacy among the Slavs, because a major impetus to Slovak as a written language

came from the Catholic Church. The new Jesuit University in Trnava (1613–)

trained priests in Slovak, and strove to reverse the Czech-Slovak sentiment which

had become attached to works like the Kralice Bible. In the 1750s they produced a

Catholic Slovak Bible, which was consciously less like Czech in its language.

This championing of Slovak against Czech faced considerable odds. Czech had

been used in philosophical and theological discussion, in the chancery of the

Hungarian King Matthias Corvinus, and even in some Magyar local administra-

tion. But ethnic and cultural factors slowly started to turn in favor of Slovak. It

cannot be said that the Slovaks had yet developed a sufficiently strong or unified

concept of national identity, nor that the Slovaks had yet evolved a clearly anti-

Czech sentiment. But the Czech language of the eighteenth century was in decline

following the Counter-Reformation. The Trnava University Press printed a series of

books in which literary Czech was increasingly modified in the direction of Slovak,

and eventually formed a koine of West Slovak dialects, known as Jesuit Slovak,

which was used by both Catholics and Protestants (Auty, 1953). Joseph II

(r. 1780–1790) reflected the more tolerant and humanitarian spirit of his age by

encouraging vernacular education and the use of Slovak by local government

officials. It was during his reign that a Catholic priest, Father Anton Bernola

published two important pamphlets, Dissertatio philologico-critica ... (1787) and

Grammatica slavica ...(1790). He proposed a new version of ‘‘de-Czeched’’ Slovak

which came to be known as ‘‘bernola

tina’’ or ‘‘Bernola

k language’’.

Bernola

tina was a hybrid of Czech morphology with West and Central Slovak

phonology. Bernola

k’s expressed motives were mixed: Slovak ethnicity and the

102 2. Socio-historical evolution

idea that Slovak was the purest Slav language and maybe even a supra-national

Slavic interlingua were intermingled with the more practical goal of producing a

genuinely Slovak Bible. Bernola

ˇtina

was essentially for literate high-class Catholic

Slovaks. It became the vehicle for sermons and the work of a major poet in Ja

Holly´ . But it was not widely accepted by the priests and laity of east and central

Slovakia because of its West Slovak bias, and the Protestants, loyal to the language

of the Kralice Bible, criticized it for being unrefined and insular. Bernola

tina,

however, did give rise to widespread debate, especially in the context of the

growth of nationalistic feeling. The poet Ja

n Kolla

r expressed not only the idea

of Slovak nationality but also the concept of pan-Slavism. Kolla

r had studied at the

University of Jena, and had absorbed German doctrines of linguistic and cultural

nationalism. He and the scholar S

afarı

k now began to put the case for Slovak

equality within a Czecho-Slovak community, which they felt reflected the true

national affiliation of Slovak. Unlike many separatist movements of the time,

they proposed a language community in which both Czech and Slovak, as distinct

entities united by a common purpose, would mutually contribute to the formation

of a new literary language. The Czechs, however, did not respond to this idea of

broader shared unity, which reinforced the developing impetus to move Slovak

away from Czech and more in the direction of major Slovak dialects.

The catalyst which eventually brought the Catholic and Protestant linguistic

factions together was L’udovit S

tu´ r. S

tu´ r, though not primarily a philologist, was a

first-rate publicist. His goal was Slovak ethnic nationhood, very much in the spirit of

Herder’s concept of nationalism. During the late thirties and forties he and a group of

Protestant friends worked out a new compromise form of Slovak, based this time on

Central Slovak dialects but without identifying with any one dialect: it was in effect a

codified form of educated Central Slovak, a new koine, particularly of phonology and

morphology. Lexically and orthographically it was more conservative, and preserved

many parallels with Czech. The new proposal was formally announced by S

tu´ r’s

rec

ja slovenskuo alebo potreba pı

san

ja v tomto na

rec

(The Slovak tongue, or The

necessity of writing in this tongue), which appeared in 1846, and was soon followed by

hisgrammarofSlovak(Nauka rec

islovenskej). S

tu´ r’s journalistic and publicistic

activity, and his breadth of vision in publishing both Catholic and Protestant

writings, led directly to the 1851 compromise between the Catholics’ bernola

tina

and the new Protestant ‘‘S

tu´ rlanguage’’ors

rovc

ina. This fusion was based on

tu´ r’s grammar, and was formalized in 1852 by the (Catholic) linguists Hattala and

Hodzˇ a as ‘‘opravena

slovenc

ina’’ (‘‘revised Slovak’’). This compromise received wide

acceptance and became the model for modern literary Slovak.

The phonology and orthography of literary Slovak have changed little since

1851, and their codification was consolidated in Czambel’s Rukova

t’ spisovnej rec

ˇi

2.4 West Slavic 103

slovenskej (Guide to written Slovak) in 1902. There have been some simplifications

in morphology, and enormous lexical expansion, often guided by a desire to

reinforce the distinction between Slovak and Czech. The obstacles that still lay

before the Slovak language reformers in 1851 were more political in nature. The

Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich of 1867 placed the Slovaks under Hungarian jurisdic-

tion. The Slovak cultural institution Matica slovenska

, founded only in 1862, was

closed in 1875, and Slovak schools did not reopen until 1918:

Until 1918 literary Slovak existed on a very restricted scale. While it

served as the medium for a literature whose quality was by no means

negligible, especially in the sphere of poetry, it was not used for any

official purpose and was almost entirely absent from schools of any

but the elementary grade, and it must be remembered that the number

of educated Slovaks who used the written language was very small

indeed.

(Auty, 1953: 157)

Even after the formation of the new Czechoslovak state in 1918, the constitution’s

definition of the ‘‘single Czechoslovak state’’ and a ‘‘single Czechoslovak language’’

gave Slovak an equivocal position with respect to Czech. The Czechs and Slovaks

numbered barely 65.6 percent of the new state, and the Slovaks did not enjoy the

special language privileges accorded to the more numerous Germans, who enjoyed a

full education system in German (Frys

k, 1978). And as the minor partner in what

was promoted as a single language with two variants, partly as a symbol of national

unity, Slovak was in some danger of being overwhelmed by Czech, with its prestige,

historicity and key role in intellectual and scientific innovations in language. Some

even considered Slovak no more than an eastern dialect of Czech, with a regional

literature but few official functions (Frys

k, 1978). During the 1930s there were

major tensions between the dominance of Czech and the drive for a separate Slovak

language. The journal Slovenska

rec

, founded in 1932, was actively separatist, and

sought to differentiate Slovak from Czech and from any concept of Czech as a

de facto national standard. During the Nazi occupation, Slovak achieved official

status in the Free Slovak State (1939–1945), but this situation was reversed after 1945

when Slovakia was reincorporated into Czechoslovakia. During the 1960s, however,

Slovak linguistic sentiment culminated in the publication of a set of principles for the

fostering of the Slovak language. These Te

zy o slovenc

ine (Ruzˇ ic

ka, 1970: 169–184)

have provided a basis for the establishment of Slovak in its own right, a status solidly

guaranteed after the 1968 Prague Spring in the two-language, two-republic state of

modern Czechoslovakia.

The separation of Czechoslovakia into the Czech and Slovak Republics occurred

in early 1992 in an eminently civilized fashion. The effect of this change has been to

104 2. Socio-historical evolution

confirm the status of Slovak as an autonomous language. Some further conscious

distancing from former and current Czech models is already evident in language

planning and legislation undertaken as one of the first acts of the new Slovak

parliament.

2.5 Overview

The development of the individual Slavic languages has been intensively studied.

But the broader factors underlying this development are harder to identify. For

instance, the role of the church was crucial for all the Slavic languages which

achieved some significant level of codification before the nineteenth century,

which includes all but Slovak and Macedonian (and Bosnian, in the sense that it

was still part of Serbo-Croatian). The early appearance of canonical texts, transla-

tions of at least parts of the Bible, and other liturgical and homiletic writings was

fundamental to the establishment of literacy and a written language. Among the

Orthodox Slavs this policy was actively supported by the church. For the Catholic

Slavs, on the other hand, the vernacularization of religious culture was initially

associated with the Reformation and scholars like Hus, though in areas like Lusatia

and Czechoslovakia the Catholic Church realized fairly soon that it had to match,

rather than merely repress, the power of the vernacular liturgy. It was from these

liturgical beginnings that genuinely literary traditions began to emerge. This did

not, at least among the East Slavs, necessarily imply the use of the language for

administration, since the administrative language of these areas was distinctly more

vernacular in origin and character. The Orthodox Slavs used Church Slavonic as a

liturgical language, removed to varying degrees from the local vernaculars. The

Catholic Slavs used Latin. Codification of the emerging languages required the

production, discussion and acceptance of norms for orthography, grammar and

lexis. Several important and often vigorous confrontations took place between

competing potential standards before the emergence of nationally supported

codified norms.

From the late eighteenth century the pivot moves from church to natio and patria,

supported by the ethos of the Romantic movement. The authority of canonical texts

is replaced by the authority of the voice of the nation. Sometimes this voice is a

collective one, distinguished by adherence to a norm which differentiates it from

neighboring, often more powerful and threatening, or authoritarian, norms.

Sometimes the voice is rather one of regional dialects, providing not only a direct

pipeline to folk culture, but also to bases for the determination and definition of

new, potentially national, varieties. The assertion and establishment of these norms

as languages has been seen by all the Slavic nations, and language-cultures, as a

2.5 Overview 105

fundamental component of their identity and viability. We can see recent con-

firmation of the importance of language to national identity in the campaign of the

1960s and 1970s by the Croats to have Croatian accepted as a language, and not

merely a variant (however official) of Serbo-Croatian.

We can now look back over the individual histories of the Slavic languages and

consider some more general features of their emergence. We take up the issue of

standard languages and their criteria in 11.2.

2.5.1 Patterns of emergence of the standard languages

In relation to models the Slavic languages have followed four broad overlapping

patterns of standardization: a revived historical model; a combination of dialects;

a single principal dialect base; and different solutions to the purification question.

1. The revived historical model

All the Slavic languages show at least some evidence of the principle of

historical evocation. The clearest examples of explicit historical revival

are Slovenian and Czech. In the case of Slovak and Macedonian, on

the other hand, we find an assertion of ethnic, linguistic and cultural

independence from a dominating neighboring culture with high

historicity – Czech in the case of Slovak, and Bulgarian and Serbian

in the case of Macedonian.

2. The multiple-dialect model

Slovak and Macedonian also belong to the group of Slavic languages

whose standardized literary form has been deliberately based on a

koine of dialects rather than on one local variant. The same holds for

Polish: here the koine which constitutes the contemporary standard

was more continuous, and shows the progressive influence and inter-

mingling of the major dialect areas. These languages contrast with

Slovenian, a koine with more obvious historical-archaizing elements;

and with Sorbian, where pluricentric variant-choice was combined

with historical components.

3. The single principal dialect model

Standards based predominantly on the dialect of one area are found in

Czech, Russian, Belarusian, Bulgarian and B/C/S, where the establish-

ment of a standard language was a matter of formal negotiation.

4. Purification

In four cases – Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian – the

formation of the national standard involved melding a dialect choice

106 2. Socio-historical evolution

with the issue of Church Slavonic (2.2.1). Of these, Ukrainian is a

dialect koine language, and the others are single-dialect based. Russian

itself has the largest quantum of Church Slavonic in Slavic. The other

three languages have moved to limit both Church Slavonic and

Russian elements. And Ukrainian and especially Belarusian have

also undergone de-Polonization.

Bosnian, officially in existence since 1992, still has to establish its standardization

and differentiation (abstand ) from Croatian and Serbian, and must promote its

functional expansion (ausbau) (11.2) within a state where there are three official

languages (listed there in the order Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian) and a complex

multi-ethnic demography. It will be some time before a clearly delineated Bosnian

can be identified.

Looking back at the evolution of the individual languages, we can identify five

crucial chronological reference points.

1. The first of these time-frames is the establishment of written versions

of the languages, and the development of literacy following the

conversion of the Slavs to Christianity from the ninth century. Here

we find the establishment of Slavic literacy and the written language

among the Moravians, where it was quickly suppressed by Catholic

and German political pressures, and among the East and particularly

the South Slavs. This development was curtailed by the rise of the

Ottoman empire in the fifteenth century, leaving Moscow as the

‘‘Third Rome’’ and the East Slavs as the holders of the continuous

tradition of Slavic literacy. During this phase many later-established

languages find their history effectively within the history of a more

powerful neighbor: Slovak, for instance, in relation to Czech.

2. The second point is the Reformation, where the role of the vernacular

in the church, in both liturgy and scripture, reinforced movements for

literacy among the Catholic West and South Slavs, and in the now

Protestant Slavic areas among the West Slavs, giving rise to strong

language movements among the Sorbs, Poles, Czechs, Slovenes and

Croats. The relation between the vernacular and the liturgy in the

Orthodox Slavic lands was closer, and the Reformation did not have

the urgency of the counter-Latin movements among the Catholic

Slavs.

3. Over time the suppression of many of these developments, for

instance among the Czechs after the Battle of White Mountain in

1620, helped to establish the notion that language and nation, in the

2.5 Overview 107

ethnic, geographical and political sense, could form a powerful union.

This idea, which forms the third chronological anchor-point, was

articulated by philosophers like Herder at the start of the Romantic

movement in the late eighteenth century, where we find in explicit form

the idea that language determines people, and that people have a right

to nationhood. These ideas gave rise not only to pan-Slav sentiments –

including the proposal that at least some of the Slavs would abandon

their vernaculars in favor of a general Slavic koine like the Illyrian

language (2.2.4–5) – but also to vernacular-based language emergence

among all the Slavic languages. In countries where the language was

firmly established, as in Russia, the movement was to distance the

vernacular from the liturgical language, and to create a new literary

language based more on native elements. In the case of Bulgarian this

amounted to reinventing a native literacy. In areas like Slovakia and

Slovenia there were attempts to establish languages distinct from

dominant neighbors. By the late nineteenth century all the modern

languages were in a de facto, if not de iure, position of greater strength

than at the start of the century, with the exceptions of Belarusian and

Ukrainian (publicly restricted by Russian fiat), Macedonian (still to be

clearly separated from Bulgarian), Sorbian (still insufficiently vital for

want of numbers and functionality), and Bosnian.

4. The effect of Communism, which constitutes the fourth stage of this

broad-scale periodization, on the Slavic languages was politically

radical, but culturally more mixed in its outcomes. While Lenin’s

policy was based on linguistic self-determination for national groups,

by 1939 Russian had been installed as more than just a lingua communis,

and something more akin to a second mother tongue, in the Soviet

Union (Kreindler, 1982, 1985a). And after the 1920s Belarusian and

Ukrainian never had the resources or support which they needed

for full functionality. After the Communist takeovers of 1944–1948,

all the modern Slavic languages had, on paper at least, a basis for

existence. The eventual establishment of Slovak within (and now

without) Czechoslovakia, and the confirmation of Slovenian and

Macedonian in Yugoslavia, may be seen eventually as positive out-

comes of language policy under Communism. But Belarusian and

Ukrainian may well have been saved by the disintegration of

Communism among the Slavs.

5. The fifth chronological step, the fall of Euro-Communism, was effec-

tively complete by the end of 1991. This brought to an end the

108 2. Socio-historical evolution