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BIBLIOGRAPHY
| Title | "Faut-il que les langues aient un nom? Le cas du macédonien". In Le Nom des langues I. Les Enjeux de la nomination des langues, edited by Andrée Tabouret-Keller, 167-190 |
| Author | Sériot, Patrick |
| Publisher | Louvain-la-Neuve: Peeters |
| Annotation | The author, linguist from the University of Lausanne, proposes a critical analysis of traditional and contemporary claims (Bulgarian, Serbian, Greek and ‘Macedonianist’) concerning the ‘national belonging’ of the Macedonian Slavic vernacular language. His main point is that, through the label of the national name, the national ideology reifies and naturalizes the language. As a result, dialectal continuums like the one of the South Slavic tongues are ‘sliced’ in different and mutually exclusive manners dictated, behind the mask of ‘linguistic expertise’, by purely political reasons. The nationalism likewise blurs the distinction between dialect and standardized language, the latter being always a modern artifact. Sériot argues that the projection of modern national identity onto non-standardized dialects is necessarily problematic and disputable, and that the omission of this fact still fosters debates on the ‘nature’ of Macedonian language that have little to do with the task of the linguist. |
| Author of Annotation | Tchavdar Marinov |