CANCELLED Socialist in form, national in content: nation-building & Albanian language politics

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED

In 1968, the Prishtina Linguistic Consultation, in the name of the Albanians of Yugoslavia, decided to adopt Standard Albanian as created in Enver Hoxha's Albania. This seemed rather surprising, because Yugoslavia had very poor relations with Albania and the dialect spoken by Yugoslav Albanians was very different from the dialect on which Standard Albanian was based. Moreover, Standard Albanian, as created in Albania, was a tool of revolutionary change and control for Hoxha's regime, rooted in Stalinist linguistics. The reasons for Yugoslav Albanians' adoption of this form tell us much about their self-understanding in relation to Albania and Yugoslavia. This seminar will examine Kosovo Albanians' growing sense of national identification with an Albania to which they felt inferior, and will argue that the issues surrounding the Prishtina Linguistic Consultation had less to do with language than with an identification with the "mother state" Albania, albeit an imagined Albania rather than the one actually across the border. Albanians in Kosovo no longer felt themselves to be a minority, but asserted their position as part of a greater Albanian whole.