Hrvatski jezikoslovci i bosanskohercegovački standardnojezički izraz

During the period of socialist Yugoslavia, the linguistic standard used in Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the six republics constituting the multinational federation at the time, found itself on the periphery of linguists’ interest. Up until the mid-1960s, Bosnia and Herzegovina itself occupied only a loosely marginal position in the language policy field where the central positions had been granted to Croatian and Serbian linguists, i.e. their respective cultural institutions – Matica hrvatska (Zagreb) and Matica srpska (Novi sad), as per the agreements reached at the 1954 meeting in Novi Sad. This paper presents an analysis of the language policy context in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Bosnia and Herzegovina, when the government of the federal republic lent its support to the shaping of an autonomous language policy according to which the language standard of Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslims, Serbs and Croats was identified as bosanskohercegovački standardnojezički izraz, „a distinct and specific aspect of the Serbo-Croatian i.e. Croato-Serbian standard language used in Bosnia and Herzegovina“. Special attention in the paper is paid to (polemical) texts by Croatian linguists concerning the language and variants used by Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins and Muslims in which the language standard in Bosnia and Herzegovina is explicitly taken into account. The analysis of texts published during the period shows, on the one hand, that Croatian linguists bemoan the eclipse of typical Croatian lexis in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s public use of language but are, on the other hand, disposed to identify the Bosnian-Herzegovinian language standard as a distinct variant.