PrefacebyTomasz Kamusella and Motoki Nomachi
This volume, which was in gestation since late 2009, is the fruit of
our cooperation, as editors, and our interdisciplinary research into therole played by language in Central Europe in the past and nowadays.1 It
goes without saying that this publication was made possible only thanks
to the kind participation of the contributors from all around the world
and to the generous support from the Global COE Program “Reshaping
Japan’s Border Studies.” Political and linguistic borders as imagined,shaped, and reshaped have become a novel field of study in their own
right, vindicated by the fact that many developments in modern Central
Europe, be they linguistic or political, are difficult to explicate without
bearing in mind the dynamic interaction of the political and the linguisticthat underlies them in this part of the world.
At the turn of the 21st century, it became clear that an interdisciplinary approach toward linguistic problems in Central Europe wasgaining importance. Likewise, archive-based historical studies or purelysocial scientific inquiries into this vertical midsection of the Old Continent fail to explain some basic issues that underlie the area’s socialreality. It has been proposed time and again that linguists, historians,
and social scientists of Central Europe, instead of keeping to the narrowdisciplinary confines of their respective turfs as defined in the high ageof nationalism between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries, join forces.
This adventurous proposal was authoritatively repeated by Robert J. W.
Evans,2 but not unrealistic as clearly evidenced by the success of Peter
Burke’s Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe3 and the1 This work was supported in part by Global COE Program Reshaping Japan’s Border Studies, MEXT, JAPAN
2 Robert J. W. Evans, The Language of History and the History of Language(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

2010 relaunch of the Journal of the Henry Sweet Society for the Historyof Linguistic Ideas more succinctly entitled Language and History.
Delving into Central European issues since the 1990s, we havecome to a similar conclusion, though working toward it from opposite
ends, namely, Motoki Nomachi from a background in linguistics andTomasz Kamusella from a background in history and social sciences.
The latter did so taking into consideration the social and political significance of the linguistic in his two monographs par excellence on modern
Central Europe and on Silesia,4 a Central European region.5 On the otherhand, Motoki Nomachi, while editing a volume on Grammaticalization
in Slavic Languages and in his articles related to grammatical changes in Slavic languages, pointed to some extralinguistic (that is, social,historical, and the like) elements as possible factors triggering languagechange.6
In this volume, we offer the reader an interdisciplinary look at Serbia’s autonomous province of Vojvodina, and ask in its title whether it
is a typical Central European region or not. In search of a reply, thecontributors probe the question by analyzing intellectual and political
discourses on linguistic and political borders, as deployed within Vojvodina and introduced to it from outside. Uniquely, unlike almost all otherautonomous regions and nation-states in Central Europe, Vojvodina is
officially multilingual and multicriptural multiscriptural. The norm ofone language and one script reigns usually unabated elsewhere in theregion.
3 Peter Burke Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
4 Tomasz Kamusella, The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern
Central Europe. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009).
5 Tomasz Kamusella, Silesia and Central European Nationalisms: The Emergence of National and Ethnic Groups in Prussian Silesia and Austrian Silesia,
1848–1918 [Ser: Central European Studies]. (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2007).
6 Motoki Nomachi, ed., Grammaticalization in Slavic Languages: From Areal and Typological Perspectives [Ser: 21st Century COE Program Slavic Eurasian Studies, Vol. 23]. (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, 2011).

Until its progressive breakup between 1991 and 2007, the sole Central European polity that escaped this fate of normative monolingualism-cum-monoscripturalism was Yugoslavia with its two official scripts(Cyrillic and Latin) and its numerous official languages (the dominant
Serbo-Croatian, and alongside it, Albanian, Hungarian, Macedonian,Slovak, Slovenian, Romanian, and Rusyn). In the wake of the destructive
wars, at the turn of the 21st century however, the polity was replaced withmonolingual nation-states or national polities aspiring to such monolingualism. This development required the splitting of Serbo-Croatian into(thus far) the state languages of Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, andSerbian and even into Bunjevac, which is a community language withsemi-formal status in Vojvodina.
Vojvodina managed (partly) to escape this monolingualization enforced by national governments across Central Europe. In its multilingual
character, it reminds us of the former Yugoslavia and Austria-Hungary,which for many are embodiments of “true” Central Europe. Hence, although at present the official use of multiple languages in a polity or autonomous region is unusual, and unwanted when it occurs (see the casesof the Republika Srpska in Bosnia and of Kosovo), it was a norm in not
so distant a past. And because during most of its history Central Europe
and its polities were variously polyglossic, we believe it is justified todub Vojvodina a typical Central European region, though at present mostregions and polities in Central Europe are quite un-Central European
in this respect. The enlarged European Union with its twenty-fourthree
official languages, if it is to be the future of Europe, is more similar tothe Central Europe of a hundred years ago than today’s Central Europe.
It is hard to say what the future may have in store for Central Europe, but the aforementioned developments make Vojvodina a salient
case that may hold answers to the questions on how multilingualism
could be re-introduced to Central Europe within the broader frameworkof the European Union, and how it should be managed in order to limit its potential for conflict. Unfortunately, Vojvodina is still too littleknown, an issue we wish to begin rectifying with this selection of articles
on various aspects of language and politics in the region.
Bojan Belić describes the present-day ethnic and linguistic situationin Vojvodina and its reflection in appropriate legislation. Inna I Leshchi-lovskaia invites readers on a tour into the past when the region, within
the Habsburg lands, became the cradle of modern Serbian culture, whoseformation was strongly influenced by Russia, challenging the Serbs withthe dilemma of how to shape their own culture “between East and West.”
Biljana Sikimić and Miroslav Dudok analyze Vojvodina’s Romaniansand Slovaks, respectively, with special attention paid to the communities’ languages. The last two articles deal with another aspect of themultilingual Vojvodina, or the “hidden” linguistic minorities, who do nothave official status in the region. Masumi Kameda zooms in on the revival or creation of Vojvodina’s new (or old?) ethnolinguistic group of
Bunjevacs.7Perhaps, Paul Robert Magocsi is right saying that “of the making ofnationalities there is no end.”8
Sapporo, November 2013

7 These articles do not exhaust the problem of multilingualism in Vojvodina,
but we hope that they amount to a stepping stone that other researchers maybuild on.
8 Paul Robert Magocsi, Of the Making of Nationalities There Is No End[Ser: Eastern European Monographs, Vol. 540] (Boulder CO: Eastern EuropeanMonographs, distributed by Columbia University press, New York, 1999).