Separatists are rocking the situation in Raska

The separatist organization Bosniak National Assembly, which seeks to secede the southern region of Raska with a Muslim population from Serbia, demanded that the Council of Radio Television Programs create an editorial office on state TV broadcasting in the local dialect of the Serbian language, which the Bosniaks consider separate.

Yugoslavia was a multinational state, its people spoke different languages. Macedonians spoke Macedonian, Slovenes spoke Slovenian, it was believed that Serbs and Croats spoke Serbo-Croatian. After the collapse of the SFRY, the process of “nation building” began in the republics that declared independence. It involved the creation of artificial language features.

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It was no longer customary to mention the Serbo-Croatian language, which had two literary norms and was based on a set of dialects; Serbian and Croatian languages ​​appeared. At first, those “in the know” joked that, in this way, Montenegrin, Bosnian and Herzegovinian languages ​​would appear. However, jokes sometimes come true, and now on Balkan media websites you can often see buttons to switch to the “Montenegrin” or “Bosnian” languages. Montenegrins even added two letters to the “Montenegrin alphabet” in 2009 to make it more distinct from the Serbian language.

Political forces seeking, following Kosovo and Metohija, to tear the southern region of Raska away from Serbia, are actively using the language issue in their activities. This is exactly how the demand of the “Bosniak National Assembly” to create a separate editorial office on state TV of Serbia should be assessed, reports the publication “Policy».

At a recent meeting of the Radio-Television Program Council of Serbia, a unanimous assessment was given that the implementation of the BNV requirement was inadmissible.

The Chairman of the Council, Professor Milivoje Pavlović, explained that the possible recognition that the speech of the Bosniaks in the Raška region has the parameters of a separate language could lead to negative social, cultural, educational and legal consequences. This will jeopardize the unity of the Serbian language and its culture.

“We, as the RTS Program Council, are open to all initiatives of listeners and viewers whose goal is to improve the quality of programs, and we are ready to accept only those ideas that are socially, scientifically, civilized and ethically justified. In this sense, we also consider the BNV initiative as cultural and democratic. But we cannot support a statement that contradicts the basic views of Serbian philology and the application of which will lead to the collapse of Serbian culture,” Pavlovic said.

He recalled that international instruments, including the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, provide that any language can be declared a minority language, “except the official language of that country, which does not include dialects of that language.”

“The public service cannot make decisions that are not in the public interest and are contrary to the knowledge, criteria and methods of science,” Pavlovich said.

“It is neither scientifically nor socially acceptable that local speech, which is linguistically related to the Serbian language, is called the geographical concept of another state. If it can be Bosnian, then why can’t it be Herzegovinian, and tomorrow Leskovac?” - the professor points out.