| Vesna Požgaj Hadži
POLITICS IN LANGUAGE: THE CASE OF BOSNIAN, CROATIAN, MONTENEGRIN, AND SERBIAN
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Chikako Shigemori Bučar
JAPANESE LANGUAGE TEACHING IN SLOVENIA
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Turbulent social and political circumstances in the Western South Slavic language area caused the disintegration of Yougoslavia and the formation of new countries in the 1990s, which of course had a major influence on the change of language status and on changes in the languages themselves. This is when linguistic issues became politicized; the communicative function of language was replaced with the symbolic, and those involved in language planning equated language with national identity. The result of these events was the "death" of the prestigious Serbo-Croatian language and the emergence of new standard languages based on the Štokavian dialect (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Montenegrin). In this lecture, following a short description of the linguistic identity of the Serbo- Croatian language, we take a look at the linguistic situations and language policies in the newly-formed states after 1991 (in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro). We show that the language policies of the successor states of Yugoslavia have encountered many problems, including some elementary issues of (re)standardization. Finally, we conclude that the future will not bring convergence and that language policies will depend on the general politicalsituation in the region.
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The first organized classes for Japanese language learning in Slovenia started in Ljubljana in 1982, still in the former Yugos l avi a (SFRJ ) . Af t e r the independence of Slovenia in 1991, the Japanese Studies at the University of Ljubljana (UL) was formally established in 1995. This talk briefly presents the changes and development of Japanese language teaching/learning in Slovenia, describes main characteristics of the learners and students, their motivation, learning process, and their later career. The Japanese language courses at UL was
assessed in relation to the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) in 2014. The
results show the specificity of a non-European language in the European setting, namely, the script, politeness and pragmatic strategies, and knowledge on current affairs and background. Some particular topics based on students’ performance in Japanese language, observed from the viewpoint of contrastive linguistics, include the concept of “stress accent”, voice phenomena, understanding of aspect and tense, etc.
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