Snježana Kordić

Croatian linguist

Snježana Kordić (born 29 October 1964) is a Croatian linguist.

Linguists should describe language, not prescribe.
Snježana Kordić at the Pula Book Fair (2 December 2011)

Quotes

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  • The long-form endings have pushed away the short-form endings completely in the oblique cases. In the last few years, there are attempts in Croatia to bring back again the short forms in the usage. This attempts are the part of the new sociolinguistic politics to bring back the archaic words and forms in the usage and to construct new words, neologisms, in place of customary words - all that with the aim to make the language in the west of the Serbo-Croatian language community as different as possible from the language in the east of the Serbo-Croatian language community. Leaders of the new language politics proclaim as incorrect what was customary, and as correct what was rare, archaic or even did not exist in the usage, and then they carry it out in practice through the control of the media, text-books etc. Such inversion of the criteria for what is correct and what is not correct in the language usage makes the native speakers unsure and frustrated.
 
Frequency of demonstratives in Serbo-Croatian from Snježana Kordićʼs book Wörter im Grenzbereich von Lexikon und Grammatik im Serbokroatischen, Munich 2001, diagram on p. 135.
  • I linguisti croati rifiutano le parole in uso presso la maggior parte della popolazione solo per dare artificiosamente corpo ad una diversità nei confronti della lingua parlata in Serbia.
  • El purismo aumenta el nacionalismo porque enseña a clasificar todo como croata o no croata, y a que todo lo que supuestamente proceda del propio país se diga que es bueno, mientras que de lo que proceda de otras naciones se diga que es perjudical y malo.
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