Entextualizing the History of the Serbian Language: From Polyphony to Authorial Coherence in Canonical Texts

ABSTRACT This article examines contemporary expert debates surrounding the legacy of the prominent Serbian 19th‐century philologist Vuk Karadžić. In particular, the analysis focuses on the arguments found in his canonical texts on the Serbian/Croatian ethnolinguistic identity/identities and explores how they are decontextualized and recontextualized in these debates. During the existence of Yugoslavia(s), only the text co‐signed by Karadžić’s Croatian and Slovenian colleagues, the Vienna Literary Agreement, was foregrounded. The dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s brought renewed prominence to Karadžić’s other two language‐ and nation‐imagining texts, which became important points of reference in language‐ideological debates among Serbian linguists. This article applies a novel approach to these texts that combines the theory of entextualization and enunciative pragmatics. The analysis shows that the participants in the debate do not merely recontextualize Karadžić’s texts in line with their argumentative and ideological positions but construct a coherent author‐function through the selective reduction of polyphonic dimensions.