Vienna Literary Agreement - The Agreement

The Agreement

In March 1850 the meeting was organized and was attended by self-taught Serbian linguist and folklorist Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, his close follower Đuro Daničić, the most eminent Slavist of the period - Slovenian Franc Miklošič, and Croatians were represented by Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski, Dimitrije Demeter, Ivan Mažuranić, Vinko Pacel, and Stjepan Pejaković.

General guidelines for the conceived development of the common literary language for Croats and Serbs were agreed on, which were in accordance with basic Karadžić's language and orthographic premises, and that partly corresponded to those fundamental Croatian Neoštokavian pre-Illyrian literary language which Illyrian language conception suppressed at the expense of South-Slavic commonness.

The signees agreed in five points:

1. They decided not to mix existing dialects creating new one, and that they should, following German and Italian role-model, pick one of the peoples' dialects and select is as literary in which all books shall be written.
2. They unanimously accepted that the "southern dialect" should be selected for the common literary dialect for all Serbs and Croats, and they all decided to write ije where that dialect had disyllabic reflex of long jat, and write je, e or i where the reflex is monosyllabic (i.e. whether Ijekavian, Ekavian, or Ikavian accent). In order to know precisely where the aforementioned dialect has two syllables and where only one, Vuk Karadžić was asked to write "general rules for the southern dialect" (opća pravila za južno narječje) on that issue which he did.
3. They agreed that Serbian and Montenegrin writers should write h (/x/) everywhere it belongs etymologically, as the Croatian writers do and some in southern regions speak.
4. They all agreed that the genitive plurals of nouns and adjectives should not have h at the end because it doesn't belong there by etymology, because it is not necessary as a distinction towards other cases in the paradigm and because lots of writers don't write it at all.
5. It was agreed that before syllabic /r/ one should not write neither a or e as some Croatian writers do, but only r, such as in the word prst ('finger'), because that's the way people speak and most other writers write.

During the second half of the 19th century these conclusions were called in the public as "declaration" (objava) or "statement" (izjava). The title Vienna Literary Agreement (Serbo-Croatian: Bečki književni dogovor/Бечки књижевни договор) dates from the 20th century.