ABSTRACT
The overview of the two case studies from the Slavic-language area, the case of the Russian/Soviet Empire and the post-Soviet space, and the rise and fall of the Yugoslav project, examines the dynamics of linguistic systems in the wide interstice between the Western 'First World' and the traditional view of the Western-colonized 'Third World'. The sociolinguistic systems that developed in the context of Slavic speech areas in the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires and their successor states examines the interplay between political, religious and ideological change. Slavic area allows us to focus on the rise and formation of national languages. The 'language-formerly-known-as-Serbo-Croatian', associated with the rise and fall of the Yugoslav project, has mutually intelligible standard forms mapped onto four state-aligned standard languages, Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian. In the case of the rise and fall of the Yugoslav project, one can observe the trajectory of Ruritanians to Megalomanians and back again to Ruritanians.
