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Language policy, ethnic conflict, and conflict resolution: Albanian in the former Yugoslavia

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Abstract

The 1990s disintegration of Yugoslavia was marked by vicious ethnic conflict in several parts of the region. In this paper, I consider the role of policy towards the Albanian language in promoting and perpetuating conflict. I take three case studies from the former Yugoslavia in which conflict between ethnic Albanians and the dominant group emerged during the late 1990s and early 2000s—Serbia’s Preševo Valley, Kosovo, and Macedonia—and examine language policies in these regions toward ethnic Albanians from the time of the Ottoman Empire to the present. Framing discriminatory language policies as structural violence (Galtung in J Peace Res 6(3):167–191, 1969), I show that conflict remains intractable in Kosovo, where discriminatory language policies have been applied first to Albanians and then to Serbs. By contrast, policies that improve linguistic rights for Albanians in Macedonia and Serbia without discriminating against Macedonians or Serbs in turn have played a role in resolving the conflicts there. Furthermore, integration of Albanians in Serbia has resulted in fewer incidents in recent years than in Macedonia. I argue that while assimilationist language policies serve as both indicator/cause of conflict, policies that promote positive language rights (Wright in Lang Policy 6:203–224, 2007) and emphasize balanced bilingualism may be seen as a potential tool for conflict resolution.

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Notes

  1. In this paper I treat Kosovo, whose 2008 independence is disputed, as an independent state.

  2. The breakup of SFRJ coincided with the dissolution of Serbo-Croatian into Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian. Henceforth, I call the language Serbo-Croatian when discussing events before the breakup and Serbian when discussing events after the breakup.

  3. Albanian has two main dialects: Gheg (spoken in Kosovo and northern Albania) and Tosk (spoken in Albania). Although 19th century nationalists considered uniting these, until 1968, these dialects both had a literary register and between 1945 and 1968 in particular, SFRJ Albanians standardized the Gheg dialect while those in Albania standardized the Tosk dialect. In 1968, Albanians in Kosovo shifted their standard from their local Gheg dialect to the Tosk dialect of Albania (Byron 1979; Byron 1985).

  4. As an anonymous reviewer points out, this generalization, while true of most republics, does not hold for Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was home to three nations, two of which also had republics: Bosnian Muslims (later Bosniaks), Serbs, and Croats.

  5. While talks from 2012 on have led to some agreements (International Crisis Group 2013: 1), in many respects the parallel institutions remain.

  6. Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for assistance in clarifying these possibilities.

  7. After the Serbia and Kosovo agreed to normalize relations in the 2013 Brussels Agreement between Serbia and Kosovo (Barlovac 2013), this appears to have been taken off the table as an option. Implementation of the agreement is still up in the air in many respects, however.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Sibelan Forrester and Lee Smithey for their support and comments on an early version of this as my thesis at Swarthmore College, as well John Cox for his discussion and comments during examination. This project would not have begun were it not for productive conversations with Orli Fridman regarding the status of language in the Balkans. Additional thanks to John Singler for his comments, as well as suggesting sources. Finally, thank you to two anonymous reviewers, whose comments have greatly strengthened the final product. Any remaining errors are my own.

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  1. Department of Linguistics, New York University, 10 Washington Place, New York, NY, 10003, USA

    Daniel Duncan

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Duncan, D. Language policy, ethnic conflict, and conflict resolution: Albanian in the former Yugoslavia. Lang Policy 15, 453–474 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-015-9380-0

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