"If Only Truber Had Been a Croat!" Slovene Variations on the Theme of a Common Slavic Literary Language from the Reformation to the Neo-Illyrian Period

Whenever leading Slovene intellectuals were in the position todecide about a large-scale solution to the literary language question,there was to be a fierce debate for several years, with the minimalist view eventually prevailing. Representatives of three differently motivated movements, the Reformation, Illyrism and Neo-Illyrism, tried to restore the linguistic unity among the South Slavs (mostly excluding the Bulgarians from the start). Accordingly, the literary language for all South Slavs was to be based either on one of the regional dialects, aiming for a wider reading public in order to spread the reformation doctrine also among the uneducated, or it was to be the language of sophisticated literature, based on lexical and morphological featurescommon to most South Slavic dialects, in order to create a nation by creating a national literature for all South Slavs (or, sometimes even wider, for all Slavs). In the third period, in the Neo-Illyrist movement, the idea was to create a common literary language for the useof all inhabitants of a Yugoslav state after the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy: the identification of its citizens with their state was to be strengthened by linguistic unity. The Slovenian clergy's, writers' and intellectuals' attitudes towards suggestions for a common South Slavic literary language, the topic of discussion in the present paper, appear to be mostly rather skeptical than friendly, and, while there were among the Slovenes men like Sebastian Krelj in the 16th, Stanko Vraz and Matija Majar-Ziljski in the 19th and Fran Ilešič in the20th century, who played the parts of protagonists of a wider concept of literary language, fusing the Slovene and the Croatian dialectal basis, there were others who took a minimalist point of view at least as decidedly, accepting nothing outside the Slovene dialects as a basis for a literary language used by Slovenes. The best known among themwere Primus Truber, Jernej Kopitar, France Prešeren and Ivan Cankar, and it was their minimalist notion of the Slovene literary language that each time prevailed in the end. Now, at the end of the 20th century, the Slovene literary language is, for the first time in history, on its way towards validity in all fields of private and public life in the Republic of Slovenia.