Authors

Discussion

The period following Yugoslavia's collapse in the 1990s has been characterised by institutional and scholarly disorientation with regards to the Serbo-Croatian language issue. The common language used in the central South Slavonic space is currently predominantly perceived as fragmented into national languages of ethnic/national communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia. The main stances in the scholarly debate that have shaped the representations of the relationship between national varieties of Serbo-Croatian/national languages have so far ranged from complementary and harmonious to conflicting, discordant and even unrelated. And yet, insights into how the discourses on language disintegration have been institutionalised since the 1990s (Ćalić 2018) show that there is a growing tendency that questions the raising of linguistic and cultural boundaries after the common state’s break up.

This paper addresses challenges posed by the fragmentation of the Serbo-Croatian language to understanding of interrelatedness of the collective cultural and linguistic practices, current affairs and wider social problems in the central South Slavonic region in the context of presenting the language to its foreign learners. By looking at how the tradition of (non-) institutional positioning on Yugoslav questione della lingua can be presented and taught to students of Serbo-Croatian (BCMS) as a foreign language in a higher educ