Sociolinguistic research of Croatian orthography: Social attitudes towards the explicit norm

Sažetak: In order to ascertain the attitude of the society towards Croatian orthography and to examine the implicit orthographic norm both theoretical and experimental sociolinguistic methods were employed. The first part of the paper describes the position of orthography within the totality of the standardization process. This topic is expanded by explaining the role and purpose of investigating language attitudes in order to perfect the standard norm. The relationship be-tween the standard language and the society that uses it is also explored. The second part of the paper offers a description of the contemporary Croatian orthographic situation. It does so by providing a brief overview of the existing orthographic manuals and the discrepancies of the explicit orthographic norm between the manuals. Apart from the description of the ortho-graphic praxis, the current orthographic situation is linked to decades of strong political and ideological hegemony. The third part provides a concrete and succinct theoretical and practical model for evaluating the explicit orthographic norm by investigating the implicit norm that is used by the society. The fourth part focuses on the experimental investigation of the social language attitudes towards the explicit norm. A questionnaire was devised and used to collect the research data. The examination of language attitudes showed that the Croatian society considers orthography an important part of their daily lives, that they evaluate the present or-thographic state as mostly disordered and confusing, but also that their opinion about the or-thography would greatly improve if the situation became uniform. The investigation of the implicit norm showed that certain orthographic solutions, like pogrješka, zadatci, ne ću, uime etc. are not a part of the actual implicit norm, while the forms pogreška, zadaci, neću, u ime etc. are used by the vast majority of the society.