Danko Sipka, Ph.D.
School of International Letters and Cultures
Arizona State Univesity
The last decade of the twentieth century in the former Yugoslavia was marked by abrupt, fundamental, and far-reaching technological, economic, political, and lifestyle changes. On the one hand, global technological changes, such as rapid growth of information technologies, gene manipulation techniques, etc. have permeated all regions of the former Yugoslavia. Same is true of the global emergence of new ideologies (such as postmodernism) and artistic movements. On the other hand, democratic revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe and the resulting termination of bipolar world order have triggered a series of profound changes specific to the region. The following processes need to be mentioned here.
- Wars in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo 1991-1999,
- Disintegration of the former Yugoslavia into Republic of Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,
- Transition to a multi-party and eventually democratic political system,
- Transition to market economy,
- Increased nationalism in all spheres of public life,
- Revival of religious practices,
- Lifestyle changes,
The author deploys a model which encompasses internal and external changes. Internal lexical changes affect the existing lexemes but do not change the number of lexical entries. External lexical change, on the other hand, changes the number of lexemes. Internal change is either a semantic change―typically the emergence of a new meaning―or it is a usage change, for example, a change in usage features of a lexeme or one of its meanings (such as connotation, contextual restrictions, etc.). External changes can involve either the inclusion of a new lexeme (typically through borrowing), or can occur through a number of regrouping phenomena; these phenomena use the existing material to form a new lexeme through word formation, modification, etc.
The present model is used to analyze the 50,000-entry database used in author’s Dictionary of New Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Words (Dunwoody Press, 2002). Quantitative analysis of the processes and statistics reveals the following lexical processes of relevance:
- Emergence of the new lexemes and affixes and revival of the previously obsolete items.
- Emergence of the new meanings coupled with widening and narrowing of the existing ones.
- Changes in the connotation, frequency and usage features.
- Weakening of the lexical norms.
- Orthographic, morphological, and word-formation changes in result of the lexical changes.