Podgorica – Split – Belgrade – Sarajevo, 31 March 2016
On Thursday and Friday, 21 and 22 April, starting at 18h00, first, in the series of four regional expert conferences under the joint title of LANGUAGES AND NATIONALITIES, will be held in Podgorica in the Centre for Civic Education (CCE).
Project LANGUAGES AND NATIONALITIES is the result of a two-year long research mission and partnership with Society KROKODIL from Belgrade, Association Kurs from Split, Centre for Civic Education (CCE) from Podgorica and PEN Centre of B&H from Sarajevo.
After the conference in Podgorica, others were announced as well, whereby the second will be held in Split (May), third in Belgrade (October) and last one in Sarajevo (November).
Main project objective is to address the existence of four “political” languages on the territory of former Croat-Serbian / Serbian-Croat through an open dialogue of linguists and other experts, as well as the other significant and challenging issues where linguistic, as science, marks an unprincipled crossover with identity politics.
Henceforth, in spite of the desired and realised emancipation and formal existence of four standards, tensions between the identity and linguistics have not settled down, while the prescriptivism, infatuation with linguistic imperialism, thesis on “fifty years of linguistic bondage” and an entire range of misinterpretations continue to persist. Those are all the reasons due to which four partner organisations from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and Serbia launched the project LANGUAGES AND NATIONALITIES, in cooperation with working group of the project, consisted of most influential experts from this field, as follows: Snježana Kordić, Hanka Vajzović, Ranko Bugarski and Božena Jelušić.
Project was supported by Allianz Kulturstiftung and Forum ZFD.
Svetlana Pešić, Programme associate