Abstract
This chapter provides a summary of the main arguments made throughout the monograph. I sum up (1) the differences in identification between the three Sarajevo Sephardic generations and my interviewees’ reflections—or lack thereof—on gender; (2) the interviewees’ absorption of elite-determined linguistic identities; (3) their fear of a loss of the Jewish-Sephardic identification in their lives; (4) the implications of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s linguistic discrimination against its Jews and (5) the combination of South Slavic languages and non-Slavic minorities. I moreover present a broader Jewish relationship with language and culture. At last, I summarize the questions I explored in this book and my findings in regard to those questions. The evaluation of my findings is followed by directions for further research.
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Notes
- 1.
Boris Kožemjakin is president of the Jewish Community Center in Sarajevo.
- 2.
And is Western Europe really ‘post-national’? The recent European election victories for separatist parties (i.e., Alternative für Deutschland, British National Party, Le Front Nation, Partij voor de Vrijheid) suggest not. Furthermore, the post-national vocabulary implies that the nation-state is a ‘point of departure’ even though the nation-state is a relatively newly coined term (cf. Brubaker 2004: 156). Since 2017, however, there seems to be a different trend (apart from Trump’s presidency in the United States): a soft Brexit, less support for the anti-immigrants’ parties and so forth.
- 3.
I am of course aware that the distinction ‘language’ vs. ‘dialect’ is tricky and very often a political one, not linguistic.
- 4.
Mehrere ethnische Gruppen sprechen dieselbe Sprache, aber durch den Gebrauch einiger weniger lexikalischer oder phonetischer Merkmale können die Gruppengrenzen aufrechterhalten werden.
- 5.
Another example of linguistic engineering and the role and function of ideology in creating conditions for linguistic identity formation is the korenizatsija in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Local languages were strengthened, and thus the communist regime invented ethnolinguistic national autonomous areas (in the modern understanding of nation-states such as France and Italy) where they previously did not exist. Karakalpak in Uzbekistan is an example of a language that had never been written and was firstly written with Arabic then Latin and finally using the Cyrillic alphabet (the order was different for different languages). It was also possible to acquire an education in many local languages (Hobsbawm 1990: 166; Pavlenko 2008: 280). Ten years after the realization of the korenizatsija, the Soviet administration figured that 192 different official languages (according to them) made the administration difficult and that the Russian language had been neglected (Pavlenko 2008: 280). Already in 1989, 23–47% of the Kazak, Latvian, Moldavian and Ukrainian populations spoke Russian as their first language (Spolsky 1999: 187; Pavlenko 2008: 283). 35% of the Kazaks, Latvians and Ukrainians were ethnic Russians and in Latvia Russian is not considered a minority language. The use of languages in the different Soviet republics was extremely diverse. Nevertheless, Russian was always a primus inter pares, especially when it came to the language use in the judicative, political contexts, higher education, the army and so forth (Comrie 1981: 35–36; cf. Landau and Kellner-Heinkele 2001: 51).
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Rock, J. (2019). Summary of Findings and Conclusions. In: Intergenerational Memory and Language of the Sarajevo Sephardim. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14046-5_6
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