In august ’24 I spent two weeks in Kosovo at a summer school on Albanian language and linguistics organized by the University of Prishtina. Next to learning Albanian, engaging in linguistic discussions and exploring the country, I was also working on a scientific paper about script systems and ideologies in the graffiti landscape of Novi Sad, Serbia. It felt ironic and topical at the same time to be working on the expression of Serbian ultranationalist ideologies while in Kosovo, one of the central subjects of Serbian nationalism.
On a scorchingly hot summer day in my dorm room in Prishtina, I stumbled upon the concept of linguistic citizenship. In an enlightening paper which came out a couple of months ago, Nathan John Albury-Garcés applies this term to the study of the Cyrillic and Latin scripts of Serbian, their usage frequency in everyday life and institutional settings, and the ideologies subsumed within their usage. His paper is titled Choosing between Cyrillic and Latin for linguistic citizenship in contemporary Serbia. I found it a very valuable read for my own paper titled „Operationalizing Grapholinguistisc Landscape to Study Ideologies in Urban Space. Cyrillic and Latin Graffiti in Novi Sad, Serbia“ which is due to come out as a book chapter next year.
I found linguistic citizenship compelling: it’s new and it resonates with my own research interests. As Albury-Garcés explains, the term was developed by Quentin Williams and Christopher Stroud in several publications, including an interesting 2015 paper. In another paper, Stroud explains that „language falls firmly within citizenship discourses, and that it is the very medium whereby citizenship is enacted and performed“ (2009:217)1. Not only did the term appear to me valuable from a conceptual point of view, I also immediately realized that the performing of linguistic citizenship was everywhere around me.
Linguistic citizenship means that language is political. The term underlines the political dimension intrinsic to language. A dimension on which, be it on an institutional or on an informal level, people decide who’s a citizen and who’s not – who gets a say and who doesn’t; who belongs and who doesn’t. And this dimension is everywhere to be seen – on traffic signs, in institutional communication, in everyday conversations, on the workplace, in schools. It only makes itself manifest differently depending on the context.
For example, in Serbia, the political dimension of language is well visible in graffiti. To be precise, it is script systems of Serbian which are invested with political significance, as both Nathan and myself argue in our research.
The picture below shows an evidently ultranationalist graffito in the city of Novi Sad. Next to the Serbian tricolour and the territorial borders of Kosovo (right) and Montenegro (left), the graffito features a sentence in Serbian Cyrillic. The sentence can be translated as „Liman does not give up on its shrines“ or „Liman does not give away its holy objects“.
Liman is a neighborhood of Novi Sad characterized by high population density and diversified demographics. As I describe in my book chapter, the frequency of ultranationalist graffiti is striking in this neighborhood.
The Serbian word светиње – svetinje is central to the reading of this graffito. In Serbian, the noun svetinja (female singular) can refer to an abstract entity conceptualized as holy; but it can also refer to the solidified, concrete status thereof, i.e. a monastery, for example. The presence of Serbian Orthodox monasteries on the territories of Kosovo and of Montenegro is a key motif in Serbian territorial claims over these countries. In this graffito and in others, the Cyrillic script becomes an instrument by which nationalist thinkers publicly redraw the political map of Serbia and revoke the independence of Kosovo and Montenegro. That is exactly what linguistic citizenship is about.
While Cyrillic is not an explicit topic of this graffito, it is arguably employed a semiotic marker. The font used reminds the graphemic characteristics of both Old Church Slavonic and banners held by football fans in stadiums – both is not a case, as innuendos to football, religion and nationalist motifs often merge in the graffiti landscape of Serbia.
In other graffiti found in Novi Sad, Serbian Cyrillic is made to the central topic. The graffito below is one of several examples in Serbia.
The concept of language citizenship is particularly interesting for applications in the case of contested territories, i.e. those territories whose geopolitical status is disputed between the territory itself and one or more national entities, more or less geographically close. While the Republic of Kosovo formally declared its independence in 2008, 89 UN member states still do not recognize it, including Serbia.
Relations between Serbia and Kosovo are a very complex historical issue. North Kosovo is home to a large number of Serbian speakers. Conversely, Albanian speakers are also a significant minority in Southern Serbia. Linguistic and cultural contact has been ongoing for centuries all over the Balkans, and Serbia and Kosovo are no exception.
According to statistics2, Serbians make up about 6% of Kosovo’s population. Serbian is recognized as the second official language of Kosovo. In Serbia, Albanian is recognized as a minority language. However, its visibility on street signs and other elements of the Serbian linguistic landscape is virtually inexistent.
In Kosovo, however, Serbian is present on the majority of street signs and on other so-called top-down elements of the linguistic landscape, i.e. those elements regulated by institutions.
This picture of street signs found on one of the main roads of Prishtina, the capital city of Kosovo, has now become the picture I always employ in my teaching to illustrate the meaning of linguistic citizenship. The pictures features two signs with Albanian followed by Serbian. The latter is written in Latin characters, although Serbian law declares Cyrillic as the primary script for official, institutional use – as would be the case on a street sign. However, Serbian law does not apply on Kosovo territory. And Serbia’s interference in Kosovo is openly contested in the linguistic landscape of Kosovo. Deleting the Serbian text can be read as an act by which linguistic citizenship is openly renegotiated: the authors of this subversive act evidently want to state that Serbian has no place in Kosovo’s public sphere.
As I argue above, the relations between Kosovo and Serbia remain a highly complex issue. But even beyond the specific case of Kosovo and Serbia, contested territories – like, e.g., Transnistria, Catalunya and others – can offer compelling examples to show how political language is. If anyone of our readers feels inspired by this article, let’s join forces and start researching the broad applications of linguistic citizenship together!
- Stroud, Christopher. 2009. “A Postliberal Critique of Language Rights: Toward a Politics of Language for a Linguistics of Contact.” In International Perspectives on Bilingual Education: Policy, Practice and Controversy, ed. by John E. Petrovic, 191-218. Charlotte: Information Age Publishing ↩︎
- See this Wikipedia article for an overview of statistics. ↩︎