Between linguistics and politics: language naming, census self-identification, and parliamentary discourse in Montenegro

This paper analyses how the official name of the majority language in Montenegro – designated as Serbian under the 1992 Constitution, renamed as ‘mother tongue’ through a 2004 ministerial regulation, and institutionalised as ‘Montenegrin’ under the 2007 Constitution – was constructed, legitimated and contested in parliamentary discourse. Drawing on stenographic records from nine sittings of the Parliament of Montenegro between 2004 and 2019, and working within a methodological framework combining Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, van Dijk, Ilie) and Cultural Discourse Studies (Shi-xu), the paper reconstructs the rhetorical strategies through which constitutional and educational designations were successively altered while the language system itself – its lexicon, grammar and phonology – remained unchanged. The analysis draws on the Serbian philological tradition (Bugarski, Kovačević, Stojanović, Šipka, Bojović) which reads post-Yugoslav renamings as primarily political rather than linguistic acts, and in that light shows that the label ‘Montenegrin language’ was institutionally produced through parliamentary argumentative procedures rather than through linguistic differentiation. The 2011 census (approximately 42.88% Serbian / 36.97% Montenegrin) and the 2023 census (43.5% Serbian / 36.2% Montenegrin) confirm that the institutional renaming was not accompanied by any change in the self-identification of the plurality of speakers.