On June 21, 2017, the Parliament of the Republic of Slovenia voted to remove a comma from the first line of a well-known Slovenian poem (Oton Župančič’s “There Is Only One Homeland”), so as to make it more suitable... [ view full abstract ]
On June 21, 2017, the Parliament of the Republic of Slovenia voted to remove a comma from the first line of a well-known Slovenian poem (Oton Župančič’s “There Is Only One Homeland”), so as to make it more suitable for the newly-erected monument of national reconciliation. The proposal was successful, with 54 votes for and 6 against, and is very indicative of the Slovenian attitude towards the use of language, which is highly prescriptive in nature. This means that in the Slovenian cultural tradition, the ability to produce written texts without any deviation from the language norm has long been a test of a person’s sophistication, education and social class, and the language norm has always been determined by powerful traditional institutions. This stance was largely based on purist efforts, perpetuated by the country’s constant struggle against imperialist forces, and it persists to this day. This can be seen in the case of the comma, which is notoriously difficult to place in Slovene due to the complicated rules. Thus, an allegedly misplaced comma very often serves as an ad hominem argument used to question the relevance of an opponent’s arguments. This holds true for electronic communication in particular, even though language on the Internet is widely seen as non-standard. For this reason, we shall make use of the corpus JANES-Tweet v1.0 (Fišer et al. 2017) to analyse the attitudes of Slovenian Twitter users towards language, by isolating and discussing tweets in which users comment on other users’ use of the comma. We will show that the majority of references towards the comma are the disparaging ones, aiming to portray the addressee as incompetent and to establish the commentator’s intellectual superiority.
References Fišer, D., Erjavec, T., Ljubešić, N. 2017. The compilation, processing and analysis of the Janes corpus of Slovene user-generated content. Wigham, C.R. & Ledegen, G. (ur.). Corpus de communication médiée par les réseaux: construction, structuration, analyse. Collection Humanités Numériques. Paris: L’Harmattan (in print).
