Details
The book contains a description of the history and the development of the South Slavic standard languages Slovenian, Bosnian / Croatian / Serbian (SerboCroatian), Bulgarian, and Macedonian. The recent changes of Serbian and Croatian from variants into standard languages, and the rise of Bosnian and Montenegrin are also taken into consideration. In the introductory chapter the complicated linguistic situation of the Balkan Penninsula is described. As to typological criteria the South Slavic languages can be devided into a Slavic and a Balkan group, and their most important characteristics are presented here. Then, the attention is directed towards the development of the South Slavic languages from their very beginning up to the present, short characteristic examples and their interpretations accompanying the text. The presentation is sociolinguistic always including the political and cultural backgrounds. The demographic data are considered essential. The discription is interdisciplinary: it refers to all South Slavic languages, historical linguistics, philology, sociolinguistics, cultural and general history. The book claims to present new insights into the complicated history of the mutual relations between the South Slavic languages, especially in recent times; this topic has not been fully attended by Slavists so far. The rise of modern standard languages is explained by the general history of the countries in question. The most recent examples are the rise of the Bosnian standard language and the planned standardization of the Montenegrin language. German text.