„Die Unterschiede sind nun da“: Zur sprachlichen Entwicklung in Bosnien und Herzegowina

Abstract

Linguistically, the past two decades in Bosnia and Hercegovina were characterized by the implementation of three legal languages, “Bosnian”, “Croatian” and “Serbian”, which replaced the formerly used “Serbocroatian”. What initially looked like a merely terminological change for ideological reasons has developed into a gradually growing language change along ethnic lines, which could be measured by quantitative analysis, the methods and results of which will be presented partly in this article. Through additional qualitative analysis it became evident that these linguistic changes are not spreading equally within each linguistic group, but are only affecting the language use and speech of the majorities of certain areas. This means, that there is a great difference between the level of standardization, acceptance and actual use of the three languages in question leading to the establishment of linguistic areas rather than the planed equal trilingualism in the state.