ABSTRACT
This classic example of a polycentric language, encompassing two very closely related and extremely similar South Slavonic languages, is spoken (in all variants) by not far short of 20 million people, and has been present in the Balkans since the sixth/seventh centuries. Since the Middle Ages the area has been divided on two planes – sociolinguistically between Orthodox (Serbia) and Catholic (Croatia), with a Muslim component in the south; and dialectally between Štokavian (east, centre and south-west), Kajkavian (north) and Čakavian (west). These names are derived from the words for the interrogative pronoun ‘what?’, which are respectively što, kaj and ča. In the early nineteenth century Vuk Stefanovic Karadžič chose Štokavian as the basis for the reformed Serbian literary standard, at the same time as Ljudevit Gaj was engaged on a similar project for Croat. In 1850 a Literary Accord was signed in Vienna, recognizing Štokavian as the basis for a new unified language, Serbo-Croat. Not that this accord put an end to dialectal variation; on the contrary, new Štokavian itself falls into three mutually intelligible dialect forms: Ekavian (in Serbia), Ijekavian (western Serbia and Croatia) and Ikavian (Dalmatia and parts of Bosnia). The latter is no longer used as a literary language, but the other two, centring respectively on Belgrade and Zagreb, are about equally distributed and used interchangeably. They differ on some morphological points (see below) and, most noticeably, in the pronunciation of the mid front vowel e: e.g. Belgrade sneg ‘snow’ = Zagreb snijeg; reka ‘river’ = rijeka; lep ‘beautiful’ = lijep.
