Our research project will hopefully give way to an analysis that blends sociolinguistics and political science. Our preliminary research question is to examine the usage of certain marked features in Serbian and Croatian newspapers and how this usage is related to the political ideology or leanings of the publication.
We will be working with contemporary newspaper articles from Croatia and Serbia. Some of the newspapers we will be using are "Vjesnik" (Cr), "Vecernji List" (Cr), "Jutarnji List" (Cr), "Danas" (Sr), and "Politika" (Sr). The linguistic features that are marked regionalisms from these articles will be marked-up in XML and then various ancillary technologies will be used to manipulate and transform the data for easier analysis.
Each publication shown on this website was selected to represent multiple political perspectives within Croatia and Serbia. In order to understand the implications of the data we gather from each article, we must be able to compare the number of instances of a variant to like and unlike source. This way, if there is a difference in the number of variants used based on the political leaning of the publication, we can compare the types of variations and see if there is a substantive difference in their use.
It is our hope that this site will be useful to those curious about sociolinguistic issues in former Yugoslavia.