Stjepan Babić’s Linguistic Polemic in the Magazine “Front” in 1971

In 1970, a language series by editor Sava Stajčić was published in ten sequels in the military magazine “Front” with a historical construct of Croatian-Serbian attempts to create a common language in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. The author of the series set out from the wrong assumption that Croatian and Serbian are in fact a unique language that therefore they should not be divided by the polarization of the republics’ variants. The series was directly inspired by the observed growing Croatian language and linguistic independence, which was, according to Stajčić, carried out in silence in the Croatian professional circles, and which is based on the Declaration on the Name and Status of the Croatian Literary Language, in spite of its all-Yugoslav political condemnation. The author names professors Ljudevit Jonke and Sjepan Babić as co-creators of such a language policy. Conceptually, the series of texts was aimed at the introduction of an institutional state political body that would exclude the scientific linguistic approach, conduct a unique-language policy in the spirit of the Novi Sad Agreement. This language was to be based on the model proposed by Mitar Pešikan, who suggested that this common language should be created by “mixing and crossing, and by taking from all four ‘sacks’: Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin.” Professor Babić responded and in a short polemic defended Croatian linguistic identity, basing it on centuries-old autochthonous development of the Croatian language as the highest expression of Croatian spirituality and culture. As the political life in Yugoslavia democratized after the fourth Brijuni Plenum in 1966, in which period the Declaration was also produced, Croatian linguists gained new momentum, carried by the currents of the Croatian Spring. The amendments proposed by the republics to the constitution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) affirmed the national languages and directed the language policy from the federal level to the level of the republics, so that the Croatian efforts to gain orthographic, dictionary and grammatical independence were not the only ones. Thus, the Slovenian demand for the affirmation of the Slovenian language in the Yugoslav People’s Army (YPA) was based on the proclaimed constitutional equality of all the languages of the peoples and nationalities in the SFRY. At the same time, the rigid position of the military leadership insisting on the preservation of Serbo-Croatian (in fact, Serbian) was considered as favoring the majority nation, whose members in the officer structure were significantly more numerous than members of other nations and who protected their acquired privileges. Based on the Slovenian request, Babić also boldly raised the issue of the use of the Croatian language in the YPA