Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies

Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies
It really annoys me that they are annoyed when we speak Bosnian between ourselves,
but when, for example, two Spanish people… or two I-don’t-know-who talks in their
own language, they don’t mind it at all.
For example, I have a friend from Banja Luka and we talk, we used to talk, in Serbian,
you know, in the bus. Now, I mean, if Englishmen talk in English, you know, or
Germans, whoever, if they talk in their own language nobody minds it. So why
should they mind if we talk in Serbian. (…) Hm, and there was this situation when
an older man began to say ‘raus’, you know, in that sense, ‘čefurji out, go back’, that
was the situation when I experienced it directly” (Baltić, 2006).
As linguists explain, of all the nations of the former Yugoslavia it was the Slovenes
(and the Macedonians) who saw language as a vehicle of ethnic and national distinction
(Bugarski, 2002: 71), and it is societies that see language as the main sign of their
collective identity that are more sensitive to language issues. Accordingly, language and
language policy in Slovenia were always delicate issues. Roter emphasized that the role
the Slovene had in the building of Slovenian national identity was not the only source of
this sensitivity. The attitude towards the language and the framework of language policy
are also influenced by the wider context, namely by the notion of a small nation (Roter,
2003: 214). Roter further argues that this notion arises from the small population size
and Slovenia’s geographical location, which contributed to a feeling among Slovenes
during various historical periods that the surrounding nations, representing a “significant
Other,” posed a threat to them (ibid: 215).
Language policy in sovereign Slovenia
The 1991 census in Slovenia revealed that one of the former Yugoslav languages other
than Slovene was the mother tongue of more than 160,000 people (i.e. 8.40% of the total
population, or 8.59% of those who stated their mother tongue in the census). In 2002,
this figure was 165,000 (8.44% of the total population, or 8.67% of those who stated
their mother tongue in the census). In 1991, somewhat more than 41,000 residents of
Slovenia did not state their mother tongue, and in 2002 this number rose to 52,000
(Kržišnik-Bukić, Komac and Klopčič, 2003).
In the study on ethnic diversity in the City of Ljubljana the authors established
that Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian or Serbo-Croatian was the mother tongue of 20% of
Ljubljana residents (Komac, Medvešek and Roter, 2007: 61).
Despite the statistics and the commitment given on behalf of the Assembly of the RS
in the Declaration of Good Intentions preceding the plebiscite, that the Slovenian state
would ensure “to all members of other nations the right to multifarious cultural and
linguistic development”, the status and the situation of other languages of the former
Yugoslavia remained unregulated. The language policy of the newly formed state simply
did not take into account this language situation.
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