Sarajevo, 1991. Across Yugoslavia, small pockets of conflict were springing up. Five Serbs had been killed in eastern Croatia the week before, victims of militia brutality.

But that night the Belgian embassy was throwing a party. Guests were well dressed and urbane, ethnicities put aside for the evening. Many were eager to speak to the American who knew their language so well. An elderly man approached the scholar and clutched his sleeve, intent on finding out his views on the country’s fragile unity.

He asked me if I thought Serbo-Croatian could still be considered one language,” says Robert Greenberg, assistant professor in the Slavic languages and literatures department. “When I told him I thought it was one language, with two variants, the man was so relieved, I thought he’d give me a hug.”

But years of bitter civil war have changed things. The survivors want to prove that their mini-nations will remain-deserve to remain. They unfurl flags moth-balled years ago, revise history to support land-inheritance claims, even speak a language artificially altered to promote political separation. Today, Greenberg would have to answer the party guest quite differently. The language has ruptured into three: Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian.

Greenberg calls the split a “language death.” Before the war, shifts in accent from one region to another were simply considered variations on a theme. Serbs, Croats, and Muslims all spoke one language-Serbo-Croatian.

Inspired by nationalistic fervor, Serbo-Croatian was born when Serb and Croat linguists decided to unite their peoples under one tongue. They believed that the marriage of two existing dialects into one language would help rally the creation of a nation of southern Slavs-a nation that would line much of the Adriatic coast between Italy and Greece and have the strength to stand against ancient enemies. That country would come to be called Yugoslavia.

For nearly seventy years, politics kept the south Slavic peoples together and reinforced their language unity. But then the Berlin Wall fell, Yugoslavia’s Communist government collapsed, and ethnic rumblings evident since the 1940s turned into fierce storms.

Greenberg thinks war in the area became inevitable when ethnic groups were allowed to form political parties. “Once different groups began to build political power, people started separating themselves from their neighbors. They’d say, `I’m a Bosnian Muslim, you’re an orthodox Serb, he’s a Catholic Croat. Who else is going to represent me if I don’t join my ethnic party?’”

Ethnic origins were less pronounced when Greenberg first visited Sarajevo in 1988. He couldn’t tell, at first listen, what part of Yugoslavia people had come from. He had to dig a little-interviewing a woman in a market, say, until she reached a particular word and reverted to her village’s speech. He found that the locals took pride in their urban dialect. They considered it a sign of multiculturalism. They liked the way it crossed ethnic boundaries.

When he returned to the Balkans last summer, Greenberg discovered that Sarajevans had changed their tune. Their city now the capital of Bosnia, citizens take care to identify themselves by their ethnicity, and their ethnic dialect.

Everyone in the region is affected by these language politics-from journalists to school children. Newscasters for Bosnian Serb shows are mocked for the mistakes they make when they try to speak the dialect of Serbia’s capital, Belgrade. But the people who poke fun at anchormen are encouraging their children to adopt that same dialect. They believe such maneuvering will help their children succeed in the Serbian world.

Greenberg wasn’t focusing on politics when he first learned Serbo-Croatian. His interests followed more theoretical linguistic lines: study the syntax, learn the morphology. Then he traveled to the Balkans under a Fulbright fellowship and got to know the language outside of textbooks and tapes. He says, “I had a naive view of what I was doing until I lived in Sarajevo. I realized that studying a language was more than noting the peculiarities of the jat’ vowel. I wanted to understand how that jat’ had been put to use-to see how people used it to distinguish between ethnic dialects.”

Then the Bosnian war struck, and Yugoslavia became too dangerous for visits. During this drought in his Serbo-Croatian studies, Greenberg decided to explore the relationship between Bulgarian and Macedonian-two languages born from a single tradition. How they’d made the transition from dialects to official languages would give him an idea of Serbo-Croatian’s future if it did break up. Plus, Americans could travel safely in Bulgaria.

Armed with a recorder and a carton of tapes and batteries, Greenberg and a colleague traveled from town to town in Bulgaria conducting interviews. Always they asked the same questions: When were you born, how did you celebrate holidays as a child, how do you make ends meet? The questions were all the same by design: the answers similar, the articulation not.

His welcome was never predictable. One morning Greenberg was chased out of town by a granny terrified he’d steal the children. At his next stop he was greeted by the mayor and formally introduced to the oldest inhabitants-his favorite subjects for the study. Most were women; many had never left their village. On a lucky day, his subjects had all their teeth, a promise of good pronunciation.

Life was hard in these villages. There was little work, and few modern conveniences. One town Greenberg lived in, everybody bathed in the river. Greenberg did too, until he realized it wasn’t just the local bath, it was the sewer as well.

But his research was fascinating, and provided Greenberg a good look at the way language realities could defy political boundaries. He says, “If you were to travel from northwest Bulgaria into southeast Serbia to northeast Macedonia, you’d never know you’d crossed two political borders, just by listening to people.”

Finally, in 1997 Greenberg got the green light to return to what was left of Yugoslavia.

His research strategy was twofold. He wanted to find out about political problems linguists were struggling with in Serbia and Macedonia. He was fascinated to see the Serb reaction to Serbo-Croatian’s fragmentation. And he wanted to hear how Macedonian, a language created in 1944, was surviving now that the state that endorsed it had disappeared.

Greenberg found Macedonian alive, but in a state of controversy. Linguists were unhappy with the standard dialect-one faction viewed it as an artificial creation of communist Yugoslavia. Another considered it the only game in town-only, there were almost no players. Most townspeople simply ignored the standard, opting instead for their own vernacular.

Not materially well off, the people Greenberg interviewed put much stake in their origins and their language. At most stops, the townspeople enthusiastically showed off their dialects: They’d identify the special tweaks of their speech, tell Greenberg about the oddities of the neighboring town’s brogue.

In this part of the world, language is hot. It’s something people care desperately about. In Macedonia, regional dialects are preserved with care; in Bosnia, they’re dispatched with summarity. It’s all a question of where the power lies.

The Balkans provides us an excellent example of politics’ relationship to language, Greenberg says. In this balancing act, linguists are key players. Many are intimately involved in politics, either as elected officials or as advisors. And most have ties with their country’s language institute-a governmental unit where national linguistic decisions get made.

Through his professional relationships, Greenberg learned firsthand about his colleagues’ roles. He says, “I had the opportunity to see decisions get made right in front of me.”

He was also privy to the perks, and the problems, that his colleagues faced while making those decisions. Rumor had the author of the new Bosnian dictionary living in a luxury apartment, while another linguist was jailed for uncovering ethnic Serb dialects in Croatia.

When Greenberg wasn’t spending time with his colleagues or recording in the field, he was catching up on readings he’d missed during the war years. The contents of an article didn’t interest him as much as its introduction. Here was where he’d most likely dig up the agenda behind the writing. “There was a political directive in nearly all the articles I read,” Greenberg says.

Agendas differed by country. Serbian reports emphasized the artificiality of the move to divide Serbo-Croatian. Still smarting from UN sanctions during the Bosnian war, Serbs felt this breakup was simply another way to reduce their power and further isolate Serbs living in other areas. And Macedonian articles emphasized the unique features of the language, how it differed from Bulgarian and Serbian.

The Slavs were as fascinated by Greenberg as he was by them. When he attended a linguistic conference in Macedonia, radio news journalists interviewed him live for their show. Differing sides used his information for their own purposes. “They would never bother me as an outsider, but they did take punches at each other through my data,” Greenberg says.

Greenberg is returning to the Balkans this summer to continue his fieldwork. He’s going to concentrate on Bosnia and Montenegro: mapping the development of Bosnian, and exploring the possibilities of Montenegran emerging as a fourth language from what was once Serbo-Croatian.

Because, despite the disappointment of Slavs who still hold onto a dream of multiculturalism, the idea of a single language has disappeared, fast.

What’s replaced it is as complicated and tenuous as the political landscape it reflects. For Greenberg, this is where the action is.



Julia Bryan was formerly a staff writer for Endeavors.

Greenberg is married to artist Orna Weinroth, who has brought her own view of the Balkans home in her photographs.