May 15, 1996

A Drive for a 'Pure' Language

By CHRIS HEDGES

AGREB, Croatia -- The guns have fallen silent and war crimes investigators have begun rooting around in muddy fields. But there remains, in the academies and the press, a fierce and unrelenting war about language.

The term Serbo-Croatian is now bound to offend anyone who is not a Serb. There are, many say, three languages in Bosnia -- Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian. And no matter how much passages may look alike, the United Nations prints public reports in all three.

The Bosnian Muslims have swung one way, introducing Arabic words and Koranic expressions into the language. The Muslims have adopted words like shahid, or martyr, from Arabic, dropping the Serbian word junak. They have also begun using Arabic expressions, like inshallah (God willing), marhaba (hello) and salam alekhum (peace be upon you).

The Bosnian Croats, led by Zagreb, have swung the other way, dusting off words from the 15th century. Many Serbs, who during the Communist rule backed efforts by Belgrade to erase the regional differences in Serbo-Croatian, say they find the new Croatian words artificial, and they point to the infusion of Arabic expressions by Bosnian Muslims as evidence of increasing Islamization by the Muslim-led government in Sarajevo.

Among the Croats, the linguistic debate, which has seen Croatian President Franjo Tudjman invent new tennis terms, is a struggle to define identity and intellectual freedom. Linguists and intellectuals say the current campaign serves mainly political ends and inhibits the free exchange of ideas because foreign words are frowned upon.

The most vociferous advocates of a "pure" Croatian, who now have a bill before Parliament, propose fines and prison terms for those who use "words of foreign origin."

"Many of those behind this campaign do not care about language at all," said Dr. Ivo Pranjkovic, a professor of Croatian language at Zagreb University. "They have seized on language as an issue to achieve a political goal, to define good and bad Croatians. And the government in Zagreb is determined to prevent a reintegration with the other countries in the former Yugoslavia. Language is a good vehicle to achieve this."

Spoken Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian, usually known as Serbo-Croatian, is of Slavic origin and has minor differences in syntax, pronunciation and slang. But the Croats and Bosnian Muslims use the Roman alphabet, and the Serbs use the Cyrillic one.

In Zagreb, waiters and shop clerks turn up their noses at patrons who use old "Serbian" phrases, and the Education Ministry in Croatia permits teachers to check off "non-Croatian" words on student papers as incorrect.

The stampede to establish a "pure" Croatian language, led by a host of amateurs and politicians, has resulted in chaos.

Take, for example, the two words in Serbo-Croatian for "one thousand." One of the words is tisuca, in fact of Slavic origin, but outlawed by the Communist government that ruled the old Yugoslavia. The word that was in favor under the Communists, hiljada, was, paradoxically, an archaic Croatian word.

Hiljada, although more authentically Croatian, is now rejected by Croatian nationalists; tisuca, perhaps because it was banned by the Communists, is in fashion.

"People are getting confused," said Zivana Moric, the cultural affairs reporter for the daily newspaper Vjesnik. "Some are afraid to speak in public gatherings."

The campaign includes efforts to eradicate words borrowed from English, German and French. Tudjman dreamed up his new tennis terms to replace English ones. And international judges at tennis tournaments in Croatia now stumble over the new terms, like the unwieldy word pripetavanje, difficult even for Croatians, which must be used instead of tie-breaker.

But even Tudjman slips up. When he greeted President Clinton in Zagreb this year he used the Serbian version of the word happy, srecan, rather than sretan, now deemed to be Croatian. The gaffe, broadcast live, was edited out of later news reports on the state-controlled television.

And members of a Sarajevo rock band, No Smoking, were beaten up by off-duty Croatian policemen in a nightclub recently after they sang a tune with Serbian lyrics. The police, who punched and kicked the musicians, had taken offense at the Serbian word "delija," which means "a cool dude."

Academics in Croatia say the refusal to adopt foreign terms limits concepts and ideas, resulting in a deterioration in intellectual and scientific life.

"In Croatian we have a single word for disease," said Slaven Lateca, a sociologist. "We do not have adequate words to describe illness and sickness, or how people behave in relation to an illness. We do not have terms to describe fair play or a tradeoff. These concepts cannot exist if we are not permitted to employ words to describe them. On the surface it appears that things have changed since Communist rule, but in fact we are fighting the same barbarity."

This is not the first time that the Croatian authorities have tried to create a politically appropriate lexicon. In 1941, the fascist war leader in Zagreb, Ante Pavelic, banned all words he deemed not to be of Croatian origin.

And underneath the current attempt to create a "pure" Croatian language, which most scholars say can never exist, lies a familiar totalitarianism.

"The fines for those who use these words of foreign origin should be so high that the offenders could never pay," said Ivica Kramaric, a lawyer who is one of the leaders of the campaign. "We would fill up the jails with intellectuals."