Novi Sad Agreement

The Novi Sad Agreement was an attempt by twenty-five Serbian, Croatian and Montenegrin writers, linguists and intellectuals to build unity across the ethnic and linguistic divisions within Yugoslavia, and create the Serbo-Croatian language.

Sponsored by the Serbian cultural organization's journal Letopis Matice srpske editorial board, talks on the use and acceptability of the Serbian, which uses Cyrillic and is centered around the city of Belgrade (known as the eastern variety of Serbo-Croat) and Croatian (which uses the Latin script, centered around the city of Zagreb, and is known as the western variety of Serbo-Croat) took place in the city of Novi Sad, in the Serbian province of Vojvodina. Two days of discussion from December 8 through December 10, 1954, resulted in the signing of the agreement, which laid out ten resolutions regarding the languages and their relations to one another.

The agreement focused on the similarities between the two dialects, and was primarily concerned with reconciling the different dialects for the benefit of a federal Yugoslavia. The agreement stated that groups of linguists and intellectuals from both the eastern Serbian variant and the western Croat variant, would work together towards establishing a single dictionary and terminology.

Ironically the agreement also stated that the future language should develop naturally, although it was being forged by the force of political will and pressure from both dialects.

The new terminology and dictionary would have its roots in both languages, and the literary journal present at the agreement would have the same content published in both Cyrillic Serbian and Roman Croatian.

However, many, such as Croatian intellectual Ljudevit Jonke, viewed the agreement as a veiled attempt to have Serbian become the official language of a Federal Yugoslavia, and to wipe out other languages such as Dalmatian, with only a passing nod given to Croat.

As a direct result of the agreement, Matica srpska and its Croatian counterpart Matica hrvatska published an orthography manual in 1960. Although widely praised by all levels of Serbian and Yugoslav party officials and intellectuals, the orthography was roundly criticized by Croatian intellectuals, who saw the work as too Serb-centric. Their criticisms stemmed mainly from an analysis of the case of larger differences between the two languages, claiming that the dictionary favored the eastern variant of the language over the Croatian.