We are pleased to announce our 11^th Bridging the Unbridgeable Lunch Lecture taking place on 28 May 2015, from 12 to 1 pm at Lipsius, room 148. This time we will be crossing language borders to hear about linguistic metadiscourses in Croatia. Leiden University’s own Dr Tijmen Pronk will give a talk entitled “From National Revival to the Orthography War: Two Centuries of Croatian Spelling Reform”.

We hope you find the topic as interesting as we do! You can now also join the event on Facebook.

From National Revival to the Orthography War: Two Centuries of Croatian Spelling Reform

(Tijmen Pronk, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics)

– Abstract –

Croatian, the standard language of the Republic of Croatia since 1991, has seen the publication of five different orthographies in the scope of twenty years. Although all agree on the main principle of Croatian spelling, viz. “one phoneme ‒ one grapheme”, a number of details remain contested and politically charged. During the lecture, we will follow the history of Croatian orthography from the earliest Croatian secular writings to the national revival in the 19^th century and the “orthography war” of the beginning of the 21^st century.