The political struggle to define a language through new letters and laws
In short: For centuries, the language of Montenegro was known as Serbian. Today, it is officially Montenegrin. This shift is not just about grammar; it is a modern political movement involving new alphabet characters, constitutional changes, and a global fight for international recognition.
The linguistic identity of Montenegro has undergone profound transformations. Historically, the language used in the region was referred to as Serbian, a tradition that persisted through the 19th century and into the era of Yugoslavia. During the 1909 census, approximately 95% of the population identified Serbian as their mother tongue. Even as late as the 1981 and 1991 censuses, 83% of inhabitants—totaling 510,320 people—declared themselves speakers of Serbo-Croatian. It was only following the breakup of Yugoslavia and the rise of independence movements in the late 1990s that the distinct Montenegrin standard began to emerge as a political and cultural reality.
The formalization of Montenegrin was cemented by the 2007 Constitution, which designated it the official language of the newly independent state. This standardization process involved significant technical and orthographic debates. Proponents sought to introduce two specific letters, ⟨ś⟩ and ⟨ź⟩, into the Latin alphabet to replace the digraphs ⟨sj⟩ and ⟨zj⟩, making the script more compatible with digital typography. While the Council for the Standardization of the Montenegrin Language worked on these reforms, the process was marked by friction, including instances where the Ministry of Education adopted alternative drafts not originally proposed by the Council.
Achieving international legitimacy required more than just domestic law. In 2008, Montenegrin authorities began a long-term effort to secure an international language code. After submitting paperwork to the ISO 639 technical committee in 2008 and forwarding documentation to Washington in 2015, the request was finally approved. On 8 December 2017, the code [cnr] was officially assigned to the Montenegrin language, a milestone that provided the language with a recognized identity in the global digital and linguistic landscape.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Montenegrin language
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