Ethnolinguistic parallels in Croatian and Norwegian

Sažetak

The article deals with the problem of language normalization and its role in the forming of a literary language. The problem is explored on the basis of Croatian and Norwegian languages. Both being Indo-European languages, they do not stay too close to each other etymologically. However, these two languages share some remarkably common ethno-linguistic aspects: Both Croatian and Norwegian have experienced a strong tendency to normalization and unification during their recent history. The sociolinguistic context of this process was slightly different for each language. During the 20th century, Croatian was thought to be merged with its close sibling Serbian to form a single Serbian-Croatian literary language, while in Norway there was a trend to build a unified literary language (samnorsk) based on the two variants of Norwegian, bokmål and nynorsk. The result of the explored tendency is negative for both languages: convergent processes failed for Serbian-Croatian as well as samnorsk. The article argues that the primary cause for this is that social and political factors take a higher precedence over purely linguistic presuppositions for unification.