SPELLFLICT · Understanding spelling conflicts. A case study of new standard languages in the former Yugoslavia in the European context

Understanding spelling conflicts. A case study of new standard languages in the former Yugoslavia in the European context

Since the beginning of mass education, standard languages have been undergoing spelling reforms/changes that produce controversies to a lesser or greater extent. Attempts by governments or other authoritative bodies to change the official orthography often meet resistance. The resistance leads to social divisions and conflicts manifested in activities such as public protests, boycotts, and even referendums. The SPELLFLICT over-arching objective was to produce a descriptive model of orthographic controversies of the selected group of South Slavonic languages in the 1990s and onwards. The focus of the proposed research is on the complex situation among the South Slavonic languages (Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian), a crucial and timely case for three major reasons: 1. South Slavonic languages share a long history of common socio-political identity and high mutual intelligibility; 2. The orthographic conflicts were entwined with the actual war in the 1990s; 3. The languages in question had important spelling reforms/changes since the 1990s. The historical moment of recent orthographic codifications of four standard languages is both an urgent real-world problem and an ideal case study to study spelling controversies. The state-of-the-art literature does not provide a comparative and comprehensive description of spelling reform/change phenomena by integrating top-down and bottom-up analysis of standard language codifications in Europe. Lack of research on speakers' attitudes and beliefs means that we cannot answer three important questions: 1) Are orthographic conflicts observable in media articles merely political constructs or do they reflect the speakers’ attitudes to a greater extent?; 2) How relevant are these controversies today?; 3) Have the younger generations inherited orthographic conflicts? Furthermore, if methodology of orthographic standardization is not thoroughly studied, we are unable to answer three relevant questions: 1) How relevant is level of transparency and democratization of orthographic codification in spelling controversies?; 2) What are the economic aspects of orthographic (re) standardization?; 3) To what extent does lack of orthographic legislation or inadequate language planning lead to social conflicts? The SPELLFLICT research objectives aimed to fill these gaps. A more detailed exploration of spelling reform/change controversies, which incorporates these research dimensions, is essential such that the phenomenon of language norms in modern societies (e.g. the link between orthography and identity/ideology) can be understood and language policy and planning (LPP) makers can mitigate against future conflicts. The SPELLFLICT video pitch (3 min): https://youtu.be/we3GkXnBoRA

Data: CORDIS, © European Union