Kristina Ljubas English/German 563DS/R Essay No 1 April 2012 HOW DO STUDENTS COMING TO MOSTAR APPLY THEIR DIALECT TO THE

ONE SPOKEN IN MOSTAR AND HOW DOES THE FOREIGN ONE INFLUENCE THEIR DOMESTIC DIALECT In this essay I will try to make a short overview of the topic concerning (young) students coming to another place to study in terms of language and style they use by changing their living place. It is quite hard to talk about language, dialect or style and their varieties by not mentioning sociological and geographical issues. Mostar is the biggest city in Herzegowina and as such it is inhabited by a range of 'different' people meaning their national and religious background. Mostar itself is divided into two parts: the east and west part of city. The first one is the mostly Muslim while the second one is the Croatian part. Both of those 'sides' (meaning the east and west side if the river Neretva) have their universities, where the one in the western part has more students coming from all regions in Bosnia and Herzegowina but also from Croatia, where the number of students abroad grows with every year. Due to these circumstances it is understandable that the mixture of many people in one place produces also a mixture of an entire range of specific styles and dialects. Being a student at the University of Mostar as well, the essay will be based only on students visiting the mentioned university. It is the Standard Croatian that is spoken in Mostar but with a very specific dialect that is recognizable in Herzegowina. It is the tokavtina but it is said that the domestic people pronounce words longer than they are usually pronounced. As this topic concerns language and gender issues, it is vital to say that strong men women vocabulary/speech

merger is out of date. Honestly, there are very few things that characterize typical womens or typical mens speech. Politeness as a female symbol is almost history. Lets start with area surrounding Mostar the West Herzegowinian Province, having the most students visiting Mostar University. Those ones share almost the same vocabulary with people from Mostar, the accent only having slight differences from place to place. One of the major features of people from Mostar is that they call their mothers majka (ma:jka), a feature that others sometimes laugh at and start using in everyday speech (on purpose, just to make fun of those who pronounce the word longer than they do). Not only does the dialect from place to place vary but also dialect in the same place. This is a matter of how Croatian is spoken at their homes, so we have situations where it is obvious that the students parents have low or high education since children reflect almost everything that is going on at home. As time passes by a great number of students get it that they are to change their language, their hometown slang and start using more formal expressions just in order to sound like people with higher education. Students (I belong to them, too) using the ikavica dialect are at first hand regarded as uneducated and dense. It is a common thing if someone calls you villager if you say lipo, bilo, mliko, nedilja in public but when someone from Bosnia or even from Mostar says interesovati, tolerisati or whole phrases that originally are not Croatian (constructions with da elim da budem instead of elim biti) are tolerable. Having roommates from other places are like a big melting pot you introduce them to your vocabulary and they do the same with theirs. After almost one or two years it is possible to be accused of applying Mostar dialect after you arrive at home. It is strange for nobody changes his or her speech on purpose, it just happens. And nobody at home believes you that you are using majka with the long (a) to make fun. It depends on you how you are going to use the new words your standard vocabulary is gaining. My opinion is that nobody has to be ashamed for how he/she is speaking; you have to point out where you are from and to introduce people to your language since there is no incorrect language if everyone speaks Croatian.

I think that it is also a duty of teachers at university that they tell students to use Standard Croatian in writing as well as in speech, there are still too many students using the forms mentioned a paragraph above. The goal of high education is, though, to make complete persons out of those children who came once to that university. Our duty is to put all effort in to sound like educated people. One issue is quite obvious: if you have learned a foreign language in high school and applied the accent of your mother tongue to this new language, it will be hard to change this accent at university, even though you are surrounded by perfect speaking teachers. I would end up this essay with one thought that our dialects characterize our personalities, us. You should not be ashamed of where you come from, you should not be ashamed of your dialect and you do not have to apply it in such great amount to the place you study and the people living in it. It is vital to develop a broad range of vocabulary to use it as an intellectual.