Abstract
Avoidance strategies are studied within Language Management Theory as adjustment, or more specifically, pre-interaction management strategies (Neustupný 1985, Nekvapil & Sherman 2009). When they consist in selection of one communicative act over another (Nekvapil & Sherman 2009: 187), the underlying meaning and implications of both the avoided and the performed act are not always equally consequential nor fully evident.
This paper aims to bring to the fore and examine the dual nature of avoidance strategies and thus contribute to further extending our understanding of these language management strategies. Important insights into these processes are found in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where co-official standard languages of the three previously warring ethnic groups are at the same time closely related.
In contact situations, avoidance strategies here oftentimes consist of (1) avoidance of ethnically marked elements perceived as potential sources of language related problems (especially certain lexical forms and Cyrillic script) and (2) employment of bivalent (Woolard 1998), or trivalent, linguistic features, i.e. features belonging simultaneously to two (or three) languages. Data coming from several different domains where inter-ethnic contacts occur, such as translation, education, private businesses, and printed media, have been collected both from secondary sources and my own ethnographic research, where metalinguistic commentaries constitute the central part of field data.
Research shows that the avoidance of distinctiveness and mobilization of bivalency are worth examining as simultaneous processes, both structural and ideological. On the one hand, bivalency as a convergent practice reflects resistance towards full acceptance of standard languages, which impose their own set of normative boundaries often at odds with boundaries established by actors.
This is particularly noticeable in the use of foreign words frequently deployed at the expense of native lexical stocks. On the other hand, routinized avoidance of certain distinctive features seems to (further) feed into their iconic meaning.
In a context still burdened by inter-ethnic tensions, such tendencies may contribute to negative phenomena such as suppression of diversity and perpetuation of ethnolinguistic intolerance.