Introduction

Although research projects have been carried out on several Slavic languages in Australia (see, e.g. Kouzmin 1988), very little has been written on the language and speech of Serbian and Croatian immigrants in general or in particular states. This chapter presents the results of a survey of first-generation speakers living in Queensland. It seeks to determine which factors facilitate the maintenance of their native tongue or, on the contrary, lead to a shift to Australian English.

Is Serbo-Croatian a language?

Some 135 years after the Vienna Convention, where a draft for the creation of a common Serbo-Croatian language was drawn up, the battle among language varieties and literary languages still rages today inside Yugoslavia and outside wherever Yugoslav-born subjects have settled. Its origin is both political and linguistic. Although Macedonian, which is very close to Bulgarian, qualifies as a distinct language in the 1974 Federal Constitution of Yugoslavia for external political reasons, the same document only implicitly recognises that Serbian and Croatian are separate languages. Article 269 says that ‘Federal laws and other general acts of the organs of the Yugoslav Federation are to be promulgated in the languages of the nations recognised by the Constitutions of the Federated Republics’.