Alexander Ronelle. Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian: A Grammar with Sociolinguistic Commentary

Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. — xxii, 464 p. — ISBN 0-299-21194-0, ISBN-13 978-0-299-21194-3.This book is about the language that used to be called Serbo-Croatian. When Yugoslavia split up into separate component states, this one language was replaced by the three languages now known as Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. The background of this situation is complex. Some claim that Serbo-Croatian still exists as a unified language and that to call the successor systems separate languages is a political fiction required by the existence of separate states, while others claim that there never was a unified language and that the naming of one was likewise a political fiction required by the existence of a single state. Most thinking falls somewhere between these two poles. What is clear to everyone, however, is that all these languages share a common core, a fact which enables all their speakers to communicate freely with one another. Although all speakers of the languages themselves admit the existence of this common core, they fail to agree on a name for it. In the English-speaking world, the most frequently used name is the abbreviation BCS, whose letters refer to the complex of Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian. Listing them in alphabetical order allows one to refrain from ranking of any sort, and using the letter B allows one to refrain from taking a position on the Bosnian / Bosniak dispute.The aim of this book is to describe both the common core and the individual languages. The term BCS is used throughout to refer to the common core, and the terms Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian refer to the three separate languages which function as official within the successor states: Croatian in Croatia, Serbian in Serbia-Montenegro, and these two plus Bosnian in Bosnia-Herzegovina.The book consists of two parts. The first part, the Grammar, contains a full and systematic description of the grammar of BCS (the common core); embedded within this description are statements identifying the specific points on which Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian differ (index entries allow one to locate all these statements). The second part, the Sociolinguistic Commentary, provides the social, political and historical background to this complex situation, and discusses in some detail the question of one vs. more than one as it pertains to language in the former Yugoslavia. The book’s underlying goal is to show that all of these languages – the common code here called BCS and the three separate codes bearing national-ethnic names – are real and existing systems, and that to admit the existence of any one of them does not deny the existence of any of the others.Textbook: /file/567969/.
Grammar: /file/241924/.
Harvard Exams: /file/2719885.Bosnian CD.
CD 1: /file/2663946/.
CD 2: /file/2663947/.Croatian CD.
CD 1: /file/567993/.
CD 2: /file/568047/.Serbian CD.
CD 1: /file/568062/.
CD 2: /file/568070/.