Kosovan Govani Ethnolect
"The Kosovan Gorani Ethnolect: A Borderland Enclave in Search of (Linguistic) Identity"
Speaker: Motoki Nomachi (Hokkaido University)
As the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was breaking up, the main official language of the former state, Serbo-Croatian, was divided into four politically separate languages: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin (Greenberg 2008). Usually, a story of the break-up of Serbo-Croatian ends by indicating these four Ausbau languages. However, the emergence of Ausbau languages did not end with them. Nomachi will discuss the instance of the Gorani ethnolect, spoken by Goranis, an Islamized South Slavic ethnic group inhabiting a borderland of Kosovo, Macedonia, and Albania. In this presentation, he will concentrate on analyzing the sociolinguistic situation of Kosovan Goranis since their sociolinguistic changes have been far more significant than those of the Goranis elsewhere.