The boundaries of Štokavian dialectas the borders of United national state of ethno-linguistic Serbs

Abstract

There are three goals of this research paper: to investigate how language influenced Serbian national ideologies in the first half of the 19th century; to discuss how Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, the most influential Serbian 19th century philologist, and Ilija Garašanin, the most important Serbian 19th century politician, answer the fundamental question of Serbian nationalism from the perspective of the 19th century Romanticism: who are the Serbs and what are the borders of the united Serbian national state?; and to define the formation of structure of Serbian linguistic nationalism in the first half of the 19th century. Two research methods were applied were: the method of the text analysis of the prime historical sources and the method of comparison of different interpretations and undestandings of the works by V. S. Karadžić and I. Garašanin. The main research results are that V. S. Karadžić’s understanding of the language in the conception of Serbian linguistic nationalism was primarily of ethnic nature and that I. Garašanin drafted a project of the united Serbian national state by implementing a linguistic model of Serb national identification developed by V. S. Karadžić.