2009/03/01 by Robert Greenberg · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Ethnic group #Geography #History #Law #Linguistics #Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity #Multilingual Education and Policy #Philosophy #Political science
paper · doi:10.1353/jsl.0.0022
openalex publication_date 2009/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
This article investigates the interface between dialect, ethnic identity, and political developments in the rural communities of Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the cultural and linguistic differences among Croats, Serbs, and Muslims have been most pronounced. On the basis of a fresh reanalysis of linguistic data which have previously been cited in the literature to aggrandize the differences, it is argued that the claims of Bosnia’s Serb, Croat, and Bosniak communities for separate identities based on the criteria of language are dubious, and that the language differences are relatively minor. It is further suggested that only certain key ethnolinguistic markers have been used to construct the notion of separate linguistic identities there.