To What Degree Are Croatian and Serbian the Same Language?: Evidence from a Translation Study

Abstract: This article reports on the results of an experimental translation study conducted in 2008 in which 16 adult native speakers of the Croatian variant of Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS) were asked to translate nine texts from the Serbian BCS variant into their native Croatian variant in order to test the extent to which Croatian and Serbian do or do not employ distinct linguistic devices. The results show, on the basis of a statistical comparison of the purely grammatical building blocks in the original texts and their translations, that the Croatian and Serbian variants of BCS have essentially identical linguistic systems across all levels of language structure. In particular, we find that the phonological and syntactic systems are essentially identical and that over 98% of derivational and inflectional morphology tokens are identical. Lexically, the open classes show a difference of less than 10% of tokens, whereas the closed grammatical classes show identity in over 95% of cases. 1. Introduction The purpose of this article is to argue, on the basis of the comparison of purely grammatical building blocks, exposed through a particular kind of experimental study, that the (standard) languages referred to as Croatian and Serbian are the same language and should be acknowledged and treated as such. (1) (I assume further that if this point can be demonstrated for Croatian and Serbian, the argument extends directly to what are now being called Bosnian and Montenegrin.) A central assumption behind this claim, and behind the entire article, is that the question of linguistic identity can be discussed within the realm of structural/formal linguistics and need not be (only) defined with regard to culture, ethnicity, nationality, or politics, despite common sociolinguistic assumptions to the contrary, such as that of Langston and Peti-Stantic (2003: 249), who state that "it is not possible to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a variant or dialect in terms of the inherent features of the language variety itself." The claim of this article is that it is possible to do so, by comparison of the grammatical building-blocks of the language variants in question, whose similarity (or in this case near-identity) can be exposed by experimental methods. (2) An experimental study shows that Croatian and Serbian are for all intents and purposes linguistically identical. This view contradicts much common lore about these two languages. There are two common narratives surrounding the historical and current status of Croatian and Serbian, both of which are based on non-linguistic criteria in defining the relevant languages as distinct. One story is that the formerly unified language Serbo-Croatian disintegrated into "successor languages" in the 1990s, as the Serbo-Croatian speaking areas of Yugoslavia broke apart into the countries of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia and Montenegro (and now include Montenegro and Kosovo). The "successor languages"--Croatian and Serbian (as well as Bosnian/Bosniak and now Montenegrin)--then acquired their rightful status as independent languages once their nations had gained independent status (Greenberg 2004, Alexander 2006). The other story is that two distinct languages existed before their joint standardization in the 19th and 20th century as Serbo-Croatian. Until the 1990s, they were artificially combined into the language of Serbo-Croatian and after Yugoslav disintegration were able to regain their former status as independent languages (Langston and Peti-Stantic 2003). A common view of the recent emergence of successor languages is revealed by a reviewer of this article who states: "[W]hat is clear is that as of 1991-92 Serbo-Croatian officially ceased to exist in the Yugoslav successor states. All sides agreed that the unified language was to be jettisoned and probably never again to be resurrected." However, examination in this article of the grammatical building blocks of the variants, revealed by experimental methods, determines that "official" declarations and the desire to "jettison" a unified language do not make its demise a fact, as the same reviewer reveals in the statement that "there are no scholars who claim that Croatian and Serbian are two distinct languages from a formal linguistic point of view. …