SOURCE: Ivić, Pavle. “Kopitar and the Evolution of Vuk Karadžić's Views on the Serbian Literary Language.” In Papers in Slavic Philology 2: To Honor Jernej Kopitar 1780-1980, edited by Rado L. Lencek and Henry R. Cooper, Jr., pp. 99-107. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1982.

[In the following essay, Ivić explores Jernej Kopitar's considerable influence on Karadžić's work.]

The extent of Jernej Kopitar's contributions to the work of Vuk Karadžić is reflected in three facts: he persuaded Vuk to begin writing systematically; he defined the main points of Vuk's program of work (publishing folk poetry, a grammar, a dictionary, and a translation of the Holy Bible); and he suggested to him fundamental views on the literary language, the alphabet and orthography.

Vuk accepted Kopitar's views (Kopitar 1857: passim) that every nation ought to use its own language in literature, that the field of use of the Church Slavonic language among the Serbs should be restricted to the Church, that the mixture of language types such as that practiced by the slaveno-srpski writers of the time was impermissible, and that the task of the grammarian is not to prescribe language, but merely to describe it. In the same way, Vuk accepted and implemented the phonemic principle in the alphabet and orthography, which Kopitar had summarized in the formula, “No sound may have more than one sign, and no sign more than one sound” (in 1813; Kopitar 1857: p. 249). Kopitar's ideas about language bear witness to his lucidity and to his adoption of the most positive ideas of the age, while the program of Vuk's work indicates Kopitar's ability to select what was essential, which made it possible for Vuk not to waste his energy on minor matters but to concentrate on issues in which his efforts would bear the most significant fruit.

In the early period of Vuk's activity, along with the above viewpoints which were undoubtedly well-founded, several other, more specific and partly less justified attitudes appeared, also linked in a way with Kopitar.

Vuk wrote in Ijekavian, although the vast majority of Serbian writers of the time used the Ekavian dialect. Vuk did this because he preferred his native dialect and because it was easier for him to write in this way, but he found his arguments for doing so in Kopitar, who had often toyed in his writings with the idea that all dialects should attain the rank of literary languages, as was once the case in ancient Greece (e.g., Kopitar 1857: pp. 278, 307, 349). This Romantic dreaming, to which Vuk gave an apodictic formulation (Karadžić 1894: I, 157), in no way suited the needs of a modern literary language in the process of formation. The Greek model was an anachronism in an age when the main medium of culture was the printed word, which demands a broad market for books, and when literary languages were functionally much more polyvalent than in Greece before the generalizing of the Koine. Had Vuk, by some miracle, implemented Kopitar's vision for the Serbs, it would have brought the Serbian literary language into a state of regional division, harmful both culturally and politically, and Vuk would not have been remembered for his accomplishments in forming the standard language but for the harm which he caused to its formation. As for Vuk's insistence on the Ijekavian dialect, it is no simple matter to determine the extent to which it helped and the extent to which it harmed the Serbian nation and its culture. If Ijekavian, under Vuk's influence, could have been generally accepted, it would have been of great value because it would have secured greater unity of the literary language for the Serbs in different regions. History has shown, however, that this was not possible, and it is difficult and inappropriate to guess what might have happened if Vuk had accepted Ekavian. Nevertheless, it is clear that his Ijekavian harmed his own struggle most of all. Of everything which he proposed, Ijekavian was the least acceptable to the majority of Serbian intellectuals (and in general to the majority of Serbs) and later turned into one of the most frequently mentioned and most successful arguments of his antagonists.

In the earlier phases of his work, Vuk frequently stressed that “we must take grammar from shepherds and plowmen” (e.g., Karadžić 1894: I, 159), because only the language of simple rural folk is unspoiled, while people in towns speak badly and authors from an urban environment write in a language full of mistakes. In this case, too, Vuk, born in the countryside and brilliantly aware of his native speech, chose what was closer to him and easier for him, at the same time discrediting what his antagonists, advocates of the “cultivated” language, were proud of. In this too, Vuk relied on Kopitar, who often had pointed out that Slovene was spoken well only in the countryside, whereas the language of town-dwellers, and especially the language used in books, was debased by the influence of German. Vuk applied a similar view to the conditions of the Serbs and gave the problem the sharpened aspect of a social clash. We can guess that he had had painful experience with the arrogance of certain members of the “upper class” in the Vojvodina, who saw in him an uneducated peasant boy. Psychologically, the conversion of his weakness into a virtue and of his opponents' advantage into a drawback is understandable. This move might also have looked like a skillful tactical maneuver, but it did not prove to be so: it distanced the Serbian intellectuals from Vuk and was frequently castigated and ridiculed. It was rightly claimed that the language of a modern culture cannot be based on the possibilities of expression of those who lack that culture, and that the literary languages of all advanced nations are founded on the speech of the educated circles of society.

Kopitar counted the Catholic speakers of Štokavian, e.g., the Slavonian Šokac population and the Dalmatian writer Andrija Kačić-Miošić, among the Serbs, on the basis of linguistic criteria. In the age of Romantic enthusiasm for ethnicity, language was considered practically the only determinant of nationality, and Kopitar was well aware of the linguistic proximity of all speakers of Štokavian and of the differences which marked them off from Čakavian and Kajkavian speakers (the latter, again on the basis of language, he considered Slovenes). Vuk's acceptance of this opinion was to have serious consequences later on: it aroused strong resistance in the Croats, who saw in Vuk's claim to the Štokavian Catholics an aggressive nationalist attitude and stressed quite rightly that that population did not consider itself Serbian. The discord which ensued did harm to the relations between the two peoples.

Kopitar is responsible for one more move of Vuk's, which, in all fairness, affects only a detail, but one which played a great historical role. Kopitar early began to be carried away by the dream of a common alphabet for all Slavs and a synthesis of the cyrillic and latin alphabets. He even suggested to the Germans that they should include a few cyrillic letters in their alphabet (Kopitar 1857: 243-256). We should be so much the less surprised, then, that in his review of Vuk's first grammar he expressed the idea that the Serbian alphabet should be supplemented with the letter j (Kopitar 1857: p. 313). Vuk accepted his advice, thereby giving his opponents an argument which served them perhaps better than any other. The Serbian public in any case suspected that Kopitar, a loyal Catholic trusted by the Viennese Court, wished to separate the Serbs from the Orthodox tradition, using Vuk as a means. This suspicion was cherished and fanned by the high-ranking Orthodox clergy, who were in the forefront of the resistance to Vuk's reforms, mainly because they wanted to preserve the influence of the Church in culture and to defend the link between the Serbs and Russia, which was seen as the protector of Orthodoxy. The Serbian public was oversensitive because of the frequent attempts of the Austrian authorities to subject the Serbs to the Catholic Church. Thus, the latin yod (j) looked like a tool by which Kopitar wished to separate the Serbs from their Orthodox Russian brethren. For this reason, the yod became the main subject of attacks on Vuk's alphabet and the main obstacle to its adoption. This alphabet would certainly have been accepted more easily and rapidly if Vuk had used the letter i or ŭ instead of yod. These two letters had already been used in the Serbian cyrillic alphabet, but Vuk had exiled both from the alphabet, only to introduce the sign j unnecessarily.

The ultimate fate of Vuk's five controversial ideas mentioned here was not the same for all. Vuk clung faithfully only to the use of yod; there is no sign that he ever thought of deviating in this detail. In connection with Ijekavian, he went through a period of hesitation about 1830, when he was living in Serbia, probably as a result of feeling the extent to which Ekavian predominated in the ruling circles of the new state. But on his return to Vienna, again separated from the Serbian environment, he returned to his native Ijekavian dialect. As for the three other points, Vuk later revised his stand.

Vuk at first deviated from the opinion that all the speakers of Štokavian were Serbs, but he later returned to this claim. Evidently under Kopitar's influence, Vuk in his first grammar of 1814 divided the Serbian language into three dialects, one of which he defined as “Slavonian.” This is in fact the Ikavian dialect spoken by a Catholic (and Moslem) population, and not a Serbian one. In 1817 and 1818, however, he had already changed this classification, not mentioning the Slavonian dialect. Much has been written on Vuk's possible motives for leaving it out (e.g., Rešetar 1907: 2-3; Belić 1948: 109-111; Ivić 1971: p. 270). But one point has not been emphasized to date: Kopitar himself had arrived at the realization of the linguistic unity of the Serbs and Croats. He expressed this for the first time in 1822, and more fully in 1836 (Lencek 1976: 46-47). It can be supposed, however, that even before 1822 he had begun to think about this: it had seemed to him unjustified to consider the dialect of a Catholic population Serbian if Serbian and Croatian were one language. Nevertheless, in 1849, when Kopitar was no longer alive, Vuk returned to the opinion that all speakers of Štokavian were Serbs, at the same time determining only Čakavian speakers as real Croats. Here too Vuk was not original, but followed the opinion of the most outstanding expert in Slavic languages of the time, Fran Miklošič, who, to the end of his life, distinguished between the “Serbian” language (i.e., the Štokavian dialect) and the “Croatian” language (i.e., Čakavian). Clearly, with the advantage of hindsight, Miklošič and Karadžić were wrong, as indeed Kopitar himself was once. Respectfully but polemically, the Zagreb philologist Bogoslav Šulek replied to Vuk in 1856. In his rejoinder of 1861, Vuk changed his original opinion considerably, admitting that there could be Croats among the Catholic Štokavian speakers, and allowing that the confession of a particular faith might play a role as one criterion for national determination.

The ideas that the language of an uneducated rural population might form the model for the literary language and that dialectal pluralism could exist in the literary language were never explicitly corrected by Vuk. He supported them eloquently at the beginning, and later silently, abandoning them unnoticed at the end.

It was in 1821 that Vuk first demanded a selective attitude from writers toward the dialects of the simple people: “If writers have any power in language, I think that it consists in this, that in grammatical matters which are undecided among ordinary people, they choose what is correct.” This is Vuk's first mention of grammatical correctness as a concept independent of the dialectal authenticity of a linguistic form.

We have very few statements by Vuk on the literary language or at least very few new attitudes dating from the 1820s and the first half of the 1830s. This was the period of Vuk's hardest work and intellectual maturing. Expanding his knowledge and experience, he gradually outgrew his intellectual dependence on Kopitar. In lively contact with the processes of formation of the Serbian literary language, he had the opportunity to better understand the phenomena of the literary language and the needs of Serbian society in that sphere. He certainly reflected on the reaction of the Serbian public to his writings; he was too wise not to become concerned about why not even his friends approved of him in some matters.

In 1836 Vuk introduced into his language the writing of the letter h in words of Slavic origin (until then he had written h only in international loanwords and in foreign names). Vuk made this change only when he had made sure that the consonant h was pronounced in the living dialects of Dubrovnik, Boka Kotorska, and Montenegro. This was the first time he had applied his new idea of the literary language as a selective combination of the features of various dialects. Such an approach is in conflict with his earlier viewpoint that writers should use authentic folk dialects. Nevertheless, Vuk remained loyal to his principle that nothing must enter the literary language which does not exist at least somewhere in folk dialects (it is understood that this principle does not refer to vocabulary, although Vuk did not stress this point specifically). The distance between this and Vuk's former concepts of the literary language is best illustrated by his claim of 1836 that if there is something “more beautiful and correct” in Boka Kotorska than that which is spoken elsewhere, “it should be taken into the general Serbian language,” although there were no more than thirty thousand inhabitants of that region. On the other hand, Vuk in 1836 repeated the idea that every writer ought to use his own dialect. But this, as the context shows, was only his defense of his own practice of writing in Ijekavian: he was not prepared to renounce his native dialect nor was he able to impose it on Ekavian speakers; therefore he allowed dialectal pluralism in literature (reduced in reality to the difference between two types of reflex for the vowel ě). Vuk failed to notice here that his new vision of the literary language as a selection of features from various dialects excluded the freedom of writing in any actual dialect. Besides, in Vuk's 1836 formulation, his liberal attitude toward dialects was accompanied by a considerable restriction: writers were to use their own dialects for the time being, until the public became well acquainted with the features of the dialects, and then a general literary language would be formed itself with time, according to the rules by which literary languages were formed in other nations too.

In 1839, Vuk introduced further changes into his literary language, the most important of which was the writing of tje and dje instead of će and ðe in cases where dental plosives were followed by short ě. Vuk found support for this too in the dialect of Dubrovnik; as early as 1822 he had mentioned that this feature was present in Sarajevo and other Bosnian towns. He accompanied his innovation with the explanation that this was “the urban, gentlemanly (gospodski) variety” of the Ijekavian dialect. This was a break with his theory of peasant dialect as the model for the literary language. The whole course of the discussion until then had shown that this attitude was untenable in principle, and Vuk reached out to urban dialects outside the Vojvodina, as soon as he had the opportunity, as models to which the literary language should conform. (It should not be forgotten that the towns of the Vojvodina were the main strongholds of his antagonists and that in order to discredit them he had often stressed that people made more language mistakes in the Vojvodina, particularly in the towns, than anywhere else, and that the writers in those places erred the most.) His altered attitude toward rural speech is also typified by the passage dated 1839 in which Vuk instructs his opponent Svetić to first “study the spoken language” (Vuk's italics)—thus the spoken, not the rural language—if he wishes to write well.

An analysis of the changes which Vuk introduced into his language in 1836 and 1839 (Ivić 1966) shows that his interventions were directed toward archaizing the literary language to a certain extent, bringing it closer to the other Slavic literary languages, increasing the measure of grammatical consistency in the language and, as we already pointed out, giving it a base in certain urban dialects. The same criteria can be discerned even in the long lists of “corrupt” forms spoken by “the vulgar,” which were rejected by Vuk in 1845. That year, Vuk also introduced the concept of “general correctness,” but he did not define it. The context shows, however, that the above-mentioned criteria stand behind this concept, especially loyalty to older forms and inner grammatical correctness—both elements considered relevant even today in issues of accepting linguistic phenomena into literary languages.

Vuk's translation of the New Testament in 1847 brought a clarification of his attitudes to vocabulary. In his foreword he gave lists of words which he had used in the translation, although they were not used in the vernacular. He included 86 Church Slavonic words and 84 words which he himself had made up in the spirit of the folk language. Vuk showed by this very clearly that he understood that the vocabulary of a folk language is not sufficient to supply the needs of a literary language.

In conclusion, we can contend that Vuk, remaining firm in his fundamental point of view that the popular language should be the basis of the literary, corrected his view in the following ways: (1) he abandoned the idea that rural dialects are better than urban as a model for a literary language; (2) the Romantic liberal attitude toward dialectal pluralism in literature was replaced by a conscious striving toward linguistic unity, not on the basis of a single local dialect but a selection of the features of various dialects, executed according to sociolinguistic and internal linguistic criteria. (Indeed, Vuk more or less tolerated the coexistence of the Ekavian and Ijekavian varieties in the literary language until the end of his life, but this was evidently a historical inevitability.)

In both cases, Vuk was on the right road. His attitude toward the Serbian literary language was sober and responsible. He was right in deviating from Kopitar's advice in some matters. Although Kopitar's knowledge of linguistics was far greater than Vuk's, Vuk better understood what a literary language is. This was natural. Owing to historical circumstances, and perhaps because of his personal characteristics, Vuk was in a different position from Kopitar: not of dreaming about the literary language of his people but of creating and nurturing it. Vuk had all the traits of a fighter capable of winning and putting his ideas into practice. This means that he was not only a visionary but also a realist.

Works Cited

Belić, Aleksandar 1948. Vukova borba za narodni i književni jezik. Beograd: Prosveta.

Ivić, Pavle 1966. Dva aspekta Vukovog dela. Vukov Zbornik, Beograd: Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, Posebna izdanja t. 400, 63-71.

Ivić, Pavle 1971. Srpski narod i njegov jezik. Beograd: Srpska književna zadruga, kolo LXIV, knjiga 429.

Karadžić, Vuk 1894-1896. Skupljeni gramatički i polemički spisi Vuka Stef. Karadžića. Beograd: Državno izdanje. I, 1894. II/1, 1894. II/2, 1895. III/1, 1896, III/2, 1896.

Kopitar, Barth. 1857. Kleinere Schriften. Erster Theil. Wien: Friedrich Beck's Universitätsbuchhandlung.

Lencek, Rado 1976. A Few Remarks for the History of the Term “Serbo-croatian” Language, Zbornik za filologijui lingvistiku XIX/1, 45-53.

Pogačnik, Jože 1973. Kopitarjeva zamisel o kulturnozgodovinskem razvoju pri južnih Slovanih. Referati za VII medunarodni kongres slavista u Varšavi. Novi Sad: Filozofski fakultet u Novom Sadu, 121-139.