Abstract:

People have long sought the meaning and explanation of various aspects of their identity in attempting to answer life’s important questions. The issue of linguistic identity as bearer of cultural and social values has been the subject of many discussions. There is no universally applicable classification of the number of languages, as the models which are commonly used range from the unique identity model and its main forms – typological, genealogical and value-related, to the complex identity model that includes even the smallest differences between any two languages. The focus of the paper is on the criterion of intelligibility, which has recently been very often used in linguistics, particularly when analyzing differences between Croatian and Serbian, with the aim to prove a high level of mutual intelligibility between the two and consequently, the existence of a single language, Serbo-Croatian. To dispute this conclusion, we conducted a study on how well the Serbian language is understood among the Croatian secondary school population. The questions we asked focused on the lexical level because vocabulary is the core instrument of every language. We found that this population has a poor understanding of the meaning of lexemes in Serbian, but a good recognition of the lexemes which are not part of the Croatian lexical corpus.

Keywords: