Motoki Nomachi (Hokkaido University)

As the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was breaking up, the main official language of the former state, Serbo-Croatian, was divided into four politically separate languages: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin (Greenberg 2008). Usually, a story of the break-up of Serbo-Croatian ends by indicating these four Ausbau languages. However, the emergence of Ausbau languages did not end with them. I will discuss the instance of the Gorani ethnolect, spoken by Goranis, an Islamized South Slavic ethnic group inhabiting a borderland of Kosovo, Macedonia, and Albania. In this presentation, I will concentrate on analyzing the sociolinguistic situation of Kosovan Goranis since their sociolinguistic changes have been far more significant than those of the Goranis elsewhere.
In 2011, for the first time in their history, Goranis officially received a recognition and a chance to declare themselves as Goranis. However, because of this new option, Goranis seem to have been facing problems with re-identifying themselves, being in a new political milieu, which has led to conflicts among them. The keys for their identification, religious, ethnic and linguistic affiliations, are of utmost importance. With regard to their religious and ethnic affiliations, having lost a traditional affiliation of Muslimani 'Muslims with a capital letter M' as the national identity of Gorani in Kosovo, they had to choose a new affiliation. Now, some prefer to identify themselves as Goranis, which has been rather a local identity of Goranis, whereas other declare themselves as Bosniaks, which began to be used after the war in Kosovo. What are the reasons and main arguments for Goranis to be separated among each other? This is one of the topics to be discussed in this presentation.
Their linguistic identification is more complicated. In terms of the linguistic structure, the Gorani ethnolect, as a transitional dialect between Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian, and as a Balkanized South Slavic, is far closer to Macedonian than Serbo-Croatian, but almost nobody identifies Macedonian as their mother tongue. Rather, they declare their mother tongue to be Bosnian, Serbian or "Other" as the Gorani language has not been recognized. Why has the Gorani ethnolect not been recognized unlike their ethnic identity, and why are there various options though it is clear that all Goranis indeed speak the Gorani ethnolect? Considering language policies of each group and local discourses among Goranis, in this presentation, I will answer these questions based on my own findings.

Reference:
Greenberg, Robert. 2008. Language and Identity in the Balkans. Oxford: OUP.

Dr. Nomachi is a professor at Hokkaido University in Sapporo Japan. His main research interest include grammatical typology of Slavic languages, language contact and grammatical change (especially Balkan linguistic area), as well as language and identity (especially Slavic micro-literary languages)

This lecture is sponsored by ASU School of International Letters and Cultures, and co-sponsored by ASU School of English, School of Transborder Studies, Melikian Center, Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict, and Interdisciplinary Committee on Linguistics.