Whither Variationist Sociolinguistics in Serbia?

Abstract

Little has changed since 1965 and Bugarski's original call to study urban speech in Yugoslavia (and his subsequent reporting of new advances regarding the birth of variationist sociolinguistics). We still do not know how the majority of Serbs speak, nor what the scope of stylistic and social variation is in towns and cities of the Serbian-speaking world. This paper will try to show how sociolinguistics in the narrow sense of the term has been largely absent in Serbia; it will try to provide some reasons for this; and it will outline what little has been done in terms of urban dialectology and variationist sociolinguistics.