Common language spells divisions in the Balkans

Nicotine addicts in Bosnia are warned three times on their cigarette packets that “Pusenje ubija” (“Smoking kills”) but this isn’t an attempt to hammer home the health message. The warning is printed in each of Bosnia’s three official languages, Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian, even though the words are the same in each case, albeit one written using a different but widely known alphabet. But the linguistic distinction is seen by many as artificial and driven by a wish to stir up nationalism.

A group of intellectuals from Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia drew up a declaration in late March claiming they speak a “common language” in the four ex-Yugoslav republics. “It’s as clear as day,” said Fedja Isovic, a Bosnian playwright behind a popular regional sitcom, in which he says more than 300 Balkan actors “all speak their mother tongue” without any difficulty of comprehension between dialects. “Only linguistic-nationalist hordes think differently,” he said. From Zagreb to Podgorica through Sarajevo and Belgrade, around 15 million people speak the language that was standardized in the 19th and 20th centuries and was widely known as Serbo-Croatian during the communist Yugoslav era, written in either the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet. But after the bloody breakup of the Yugoslav federation in the 1990s, nationalist elites tried to widen the linguistic gap between the newly-born countries.

Croatia introduced words such as “zracna luka” instead of “aerodrom” for airport, while a spokesman is a now a “glasnogovornik” (literally “loudspeaker”) instead of “portparol”. Montenegro, after declaring independence from Serbia in 2006, created two new letters in its alphabet. In impoverished Bosnia, still deeply ethnically divided more than 20 years after the war that left 100,000 people dead, authorities circulate documents in three, often identical versions-a significant cost for the country of 3.5 million people.