Indicating ideology: Variation in Montenegrin orthography

Abstract

This contribution discusses variation in orthography on a standard language level as a semiotic practice of extra-lingual exclusion and intra-lingual stylistic differentiation in a South Slavic language, Montenegrin. I will address recent orthography reforms and their use following the emancipation of Serbo-Croatian. Orthographic variants, I argue, function as semiotic means of exclusion from the former common language concept and as an emphasized differentiation to other standard varieties emerging from Serbo-Croatian, and therefore hold sociocultural indexicality. Such variation needs to be examined in its ideological embedding. Consequently, I will discuss how competing orthography reforms and variants following from these are connected to ideological disputes in the post-Serbo-Croatian linguistic sphere and how the use of either one orthography or another is constructed as stylistic representations of ideological perspectives.