https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4593-212X
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ABSTRACT
This article explores Yugoslav education policy in Vojvodina (Serbia), one of the most multilingual regions of the country, which was implemented in the period between the 1960s and 1980s through the school subject the ‘Language of social environment’ (LSE). Based on archival and field research, this case study is devoted to the school subject Hungarian as LSE intended for students whose L1 was Serbo-Croatian. The article addresses the discourses of policy makers who advocated for the introduction of LSE and how former students and teachers remember the school subject, which was abolished in the 1990s. The analysis shows that LSE was based on the values of societal multilingualism for all members of society and in line with a ‘language-as-resource’ orientation to language planning and policy, both as an etic concept at top-down policy level and as an emic concept at local level where nostalgic memories and bottom-up initiatives for its reintroduction emerged.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Sandra Buljanović Simonović for participating in the research that motivated our interest in this topic. We are indebted to Jelena Filipović, Stijn Vervaet, and Sunnie Rucker-Chang for their valuable comments and corrections to this text.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Quotations in Serbian and Hungarian languages have been translated by the authors.
2 Although partially overlapping synonyms, the terms Hungarian and Magyar are usually used in the scholarly literature in different meanings: the first is related to (Hungarian) national identity and statehood, while the latter is associated with the particular (Magyar) ethnic and language identity (Berecz, Citation2013).
3 Of twenty-seven Yugoslav ‘autochthonous’ languages (that is, spoken on the Yugoslav territory for at least a century), only fourteen actually came under the scope of official LPP. These were: Albanian, Bulgarian, Czech, Hungarian, Italian, Macedonian, Romany, Romanian, Ruthenian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovene, Turkish, and Ukrainian (Škiljan, Citation1992).
4 Type A was applied in Slovenia (Italian), Croatia (Italian, Hungarian, and Czech), Montenegro (Albanian), Macedonia (Albanian and Turkish), Serbia (Central: Albanian and Bulgarian; Vojvodina: Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian, and Ruthenian; Kosovo: Albanian and Turkish); Type B was implemented in Prekmurje (Slovenia), Slavonia (Croatia), and Vojvodina (Serbia); Type C was used for scattered members of nationalities across the country (Novak-Lukanovič, Citation1988).
5 Regarding the Hungarian language outside of Vojvodina (Serbia), it was taught as LSE in Slavonia (Croatia) as well and in bilingual Slovenian-Hungarian classes in Prekmurje (Slovenia) (Novak-Lukanovič, Citation1988).
6 The fieldwork was approved by the Norwegian Center for Research Data (NSD) under number 707423. Interview participants signed consent forms in which they agreed that their data be stored according to the NSD’s guidelines and that information they shared with authors can be published anonymously.
7 Várady and Varadi are the respective Hungarian and Serbian spellings of the same person’s surname.
8 Despite all the efforts of the communists, the movements for national emancipation and the reorganization of the country according to confederal principles became current again, among others, the national movements of Bosnian Muslims, Croats, Albanians in Kosovo, etc. (Calic, Citation2019).
9 The Law on the Official Use of Languages and Scripts in Serbia (2010) stipulates that the names of settlements, squares, streets and other toponyms are officially written in the Serbian language and in the languages of the local national minorities, according to their tradition and spelling (Mandić & Buljanović Simonović, Citation2017).
10 The census in the fall of 2022 is expected to show a large decline in the number of Hungarians in D/T like in the entire province, due to emigration, low birth rates, and assimilation.
11 The quotation marks index the changing status of minority and majority. For example, Serbs in Vojvodina have been a majority generally, but in many places where Hungarian as LSE was taught, they were a minority.
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Notes on contributors
Marija Mandić
Marija Mandić is a research fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory University of Belgrade. She received a PhD from the University of Belgrade (2010) and the Humboldt Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers at the Humboldt University in Berlin (2016–2018). Her research explores the relationship between language and ethnicity, minority languages, and the challenges of multilingualism in contemporary Southeast European societies. Her research interests include critical discourse analysis of media and political discourse, critical sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and language ethnography.
Krisztina Rácz
Krisztina Rácz is a researcher at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory of the University of Belgrade. She holds a PhD in interdisciplinary Balkan Studies from the University of Ljubljana and has an MA in Sociology and Social Anthropology from the Central European University in Budapest. Her research interests include language, multilingualism / multiculturalism, ethnic minorities, gender and education, with a special focus on Central and Southeastern Europe. To the study of these, she is applying ethnographic and discourse analytical methods which build on contemporary theoretical perspectives.