Abstract
Though ethno-national criteria today play a decisive role, the sociolinguistic makeup of post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina is often portrayed as (once) the site of co-presence and overlap of the so-called Eastern and Western variants of the previously shared standard language. The Eastern/ Western dichotomy is in fact often invoked in discussions about ethnolinguistic and social boundaries.
The discourses of Orientalism and Occidentalism, nowadays coupled with nationalist discourses and discourses of (in)tolerance, are particularly prominent in debates concerning the use of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. The tension surrounding the country's two official scripts is also manifest in the linguistic landscape, usually by means of erasures or exclusions of one or the other.
My paper examines this tension from the perspective of language conflict studies. I analyze the most recurring discourses from an online media dataset as well as practices and strategies deployed by different categories of actors in the linguistic landscape of Brčko District, based on ethnographic field research.