This book uses a specialized corpus of public language-related discourse to investigate links between language ideologies and ethnonationalism in contemporary West Central Balkans. Despite a century and a half of shared linguistic history, the nations making up the central part of former Yugoslavia continue to debate the ownership over the common language, creating much animosity, some legal issues, and often absurd circumstances. At the heart of the ongoing language debate over Central South Slavic is the belief in language as the cornerstone of ethnonational identity and the legitimacy of ethnic groups’ claims to sovereignty. Given a history of conflict and the recent resurgence in extreme ethnonationalism, an understanding of ethnolinguistic contestation in the region is as important as ever. This book will be of interest to social scientists working in fields as diverse as (applied) linguistics, anthropology, media studies, political science, sociology and history, as well as other scholars with an interest in language and society.

This book asks why several ethnic and linguistic groups in Central Europe and the Balkans have not yet been legally recognized as national minorities. Some of these hidden minorities have not developed an intellectual elite that can visibly present their identity and claims to the majority population. Other groups are deliberately concealing their existence and language for reasons of self-protection. The chapters in this volume address the everyday mechanisms of hiding and being hidden in the transition zone of these two European regions.

The authors in this volume seek to treat the modern history of the Balkans from a transnational and relational perspective in terms of shared and connected, as well as entangled, histories, transfers and crossings.

This book bridges the gap between academic researchers and policymaking experts working on the Western Balkans and those dealing with the Baltic States. Within the frame of a comparative and cross-regional approach, Vassilis Petsinis generates new insights in subjects as diverse as: how geopolitics shape the management of ethnic relations; the variants of Euroscepticism; opposition to immigration and LGBTQI rights; the patterns of multi-ethnic cohabitation; as well as the endeavour by parties of the populist and radical right to embed their platforms into the longer trajectories of ethno-nationalism in the countries and societies studied (Estonia and Latvia from the Baltic States; Croatia and Serbia from the Western Balkans). This work also assesses the extent to which the centrality of ethnic cleavages can be contested, temporarily effaced, or ultimately transformed by the increasing significance of the economy (social welfare and transparency) in multi-ethnic societies. The book adds a sound contribution towards updating and upgrading the study of ethnopolitics not solely across Central and Eastern Europe, but as a whole.

After Yugoslavia collapsed in 1991 Serbo-Croatian disintegrated. Using his first-hand observations before and after communism Robert Greenberg describes how the languages of Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, and Montenegro came into being and shows how their genesis reflects ethnic, religious, and political identity.

This is a companion volume to Ethnicity and Nationalism in Russia, the CIS and the Baltic States. It brings together scholars from the UK, Poland, Slovakia, Belgium, Greece Bulgaria and the USA to examine the legacy left by decades of communist rule and to assess the importance of the revival of ethnicity and nationalism for the fate of the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe and of the Balkans as they approach the millennium. A wide range of viewpoints are presented on the key issues of national identity, state formation, nationalist ideology and the issue of territorial and ethnic identity. Different theories are outlined and differences and similarities in the process of nation building discussed. The latest research findings are presented and Western readers are offered insights via a series of comprehensive studies of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Romania, Croatia and Albania. As with its companion volume, this book demonstrates the difficulties of creating modern nation states in war-torn ex-Yugoslavia or in the post-communist countries of East-Central Europe.