“Let’s Work on our Serbian!”: Standard Language Ideology, Metaphors, and Discourses about Serbian National Identity in the Newspaper Politika in 2015

Abstract

This chapter explores the use of metaphors in the column “Let’s Safeguard Serbian” in the Serbian newspaper Politika in 2015. In this column, adherents of the standard language ideology offered advice about spelling, loanwords, and syntax as well as regarding the name of the language and preferred alphabet. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and metaphor analysis, I examine the link between prescriptivism and contemporary discourses on Serbian national identity. I argue that most metaphors appearing in texts that fall into “the complaint tradition” (Milroy and Milroy) do not reveal a clear-cut link between prescriptivism and nationalism. However, the complaint tradition also reactivates a rich repository of conventional(ized) metaphors and metonymies that reach back to Romanticism and have much more far-reaching implications ideologically.