April 1, 2024

The Twenty-Sixth Annual Kenneth E. Naylor Memorial Lecture feat. Bojan Belić (University of Washington)

bojan belic of the university of washington

photo of Dr. Brian Joseph, current Naylor Professor at Ohio State

photo of the late professor Dr. Kenneth E. Naylor

Dr. Belić at the projector screen reading from a selected quote

On April 1st, 2024 the Twenty-Sixth Annual Kenneth E. Naylor Memorial Lecture in South Slavic Linguistics met at the Faculty Club to celebrate and continue the scholarly tradition of the late great Kenneth E. Naylor. On this occasion we also celebrated the esteemed scholar Dr. Brian Joseph, who this year is finally retiring after decades of meaningful elevation of the field.

This year's lecture featuered and Ohio State alumni, Bojan Belić of the University of Washington, a former student of Dr. Joseph, who brought to this talk a special energy and passion in the subject of South Slavic Linguistics.

Belić's talk, "The Uneasy Living and Unceasing Death of Croatoserbian/Serbocroatian (In Between Lingua Communis and Common Language)", expertly and gracefully integrated the works of Naylor and Joseph. The result - one of the most thoughtful and engaging lectures this series has ever experienced.

While this may have been the last of the Naylor Lecture Series, we believe that the legacy of Kenneth E. Naylor and his successors, like Dr. Joseph and Dr. Belić, bring to scholarship unique insights that we at the Slavic Department feel honored to have enjoyed.

We hope you continue to celebrate the legacy of Dr. Naylor, and we would like to thank you for all those who have participated in this endeavor!

photo of Dr. joseph, dr. brintlinger, dr. belić, and

Please see the abstract of Dr. Belić's lecture below, as we encourage you to look back at previous lectures.

"The Uneasy Living and Unceasing Death of Croatoserbian/Serbocroatian (In Between Lingua Communis and Common Language)"

How do you describe a language like Croatoserbian/Serbocroatian (C/S)? A natural language? A linguistic concoction? A sham?

In his book chapter entitled Serbo-Croatian that was published in 1980, Kenneth E. Naylor described the Serbo-Croatian language (a label equivalent, in terms of referent, to Croatoserbian, Serbocroatian, and Croato-Serbian, to denote one and the same entity.as “unique among the literary Slavic languages (Naylor 1980:65)” and for three – though arguably more – reasons. Each of those reasons, in Naylor’s view, presented a language characterized by something he referred to as linguistic pluralism.

Naylor (1980:65) conveniently asserted that the Serbo-Croatian literary language only dated back to the mid-nineteenth century

when the Croats agreed to adopt Vuk Karadžić’s “Serbian language” as their literary language. This came about due to the lack of a “Croatian” literary language acceptable to all Croats and to the urgent political motivations for its adoption. It is fair to say that the decision by the Croatian intelligentsia to adopt “Serbian” as their literary language in the nineteenth century had a political aspect, similar to the efforts of some Croatian linguists to separate “Croatian” from “Serbian” in the past decade.

Crucially, Naylor emphasized two life-altering moments in the known existence of C/S which had political motives at their core.

The nut-shell-like description of C/S speaks to what I suggest was the uneasy living of the language itself. What adds to the language’s uniqueness, as noted by Naylor, is the fact that, in 1991, C/S died a nominal language death (Greenberg 1999:142). There are, however, documented reasons to take a closer look at what I suggest is, in fact, the unceasing death of the language.

So, how does one describe a language like C/S?

I don’t. In this Kenneth E. Naylor Memorial Lecture in South Slavic Linguistics, I focus rather on a detailed examination of the uneasy living and the unceasing death of C/S, including an inquiry into whether or not we are at all presented with the phenomena of the life and the death of a language.