Anita Peti-Stantić, Jezik naš i/ili njihov: Vježbe iz poredbene povijesti južnoslavenskih standardizacijskih procesa. Zagreb, Croatia: Srednja Europa, 2008. 495 pp.

Reviewed by Maciej Czerwiński

Abstract

This book examines one of the most complex linguistic and cultural problems in the Slavic world, the case of literary languages in former Yugoslavia. The large amount of relevant scholarship devoted to this field has for many years attempted to answer one question: how many literary (standard) languages are there? This question entails several other questions concerning the existence or non-existence of this or that language, literariness and linguistic intelligibility, language and nationhood, and so on. As a result, there are, especially in the Croatian and Serbian literature, an enormous number of books that focused their study on this particular issue. When confronted with a work entitled Language, Ours and/or Theirs, one expects a similar dispute marshalling one or another sort of argumentation to demonstrate either that a Serbo-Croatian language does or does not exist. This is, however, not the case, as the book in question has a completely different nature.