BB: Language and Script Choice Between Medium and Identity
How do language and script choices reflect identity across different communicative contexts? This lecture explores the use of Latin and Cyrillic scripts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a particular focus on the Republika Srpska. Drawing on five studies encompassing linguistic landscapes, institutional websites, online newspaper comments, Wikipedia usage, and a survey of script preferences, it examines how writing practices vary between public institutions and everyday communication. The findings reveal a striking contrast: while Cyrillic functions as a marker of regional and national identity in institutional settings, Latin dominates commercial, digital, and private communication, even among Serbian-speaking users. The lecture highlights how script choice and language choice do not necessarily coincide, but are shaped by the medium, communicative context, and symbolic meanings of writing systems.
Dr. Maria Katarzyna Prenner is a Slavic linguist specializing in East Slavic languages, Polish, and Bosnian, with a particular focus on language contact, conflict linguistics, and sociolinguistics. She studied Slavic philology in Vienna and received her PhD from the University of Cologne. After holding positions at the Universities of Cologne and Giessen, she joined the Institute of Slavic Studies at the University of Graz as a postdoctoral researcher. In October and November 2025, she was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Alberta, Canada.
Her habilitation project examines the emergence of the Belarusian standard language in the context of Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian influences, focusing on the interplay between language, identity, and political power. Her research interests include biscriptality, grammaticalization, morphosyntax, and language and script conflicts in Eastern Europe. She also investigates language shift and language prestige through the analysis of Wikipedia data. Her work combines corpus-based research with digital humanities methods to examine linguistic change in historical and contemporary contexts.
Jana Beller graduated from HTL Leoben, specialising in Logistics and Industrial Engineering, before moving to Graz to study Slavic Studies, focusing on Russian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCMS). She is currently completing her Master's degree.
She works as a German language guest lecturer at the Universities of Bihać and Banja Luka, as well as at the Police Academy in Banja Luka. In 2026, she co-authored her first book with Honorary Consul Dr. Jörg Hofreiter, the Security Glossary, featuring terminology in German, English, Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian. She also works as Dr. Hofreiter's assistant, gaining valuable insights into Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In September 2026, she presented on “EU Enlargement Fatigue” at the EYFON European Peace Days.