Cyrillic alphabet as the designation of national identity among students of University of Priština with temporary head office in Kosovska Mitrovica

Abstract

The relationship between culture and nationality and in that sense – national identity of a particular community – is a known thing for a long time. Nationality is usually strongly connected to culture. We will only mention few of their joint characteristics: language, religion, art, customs, tradition etc. In this article special attention will be paid to one of the features of national identity – language – and we will focus on the usage of Cyrillic alphabet of our target group (students of University of Priština, with temporary head office in Kosovska Mitrovica). The study consists of two smaller researches. In the first part we explored reactions of students at University of Priština and we assumed that they will have different reactions towards Cyrillic alphabet and Latin alphabet used as stimuli-words comparing to pupils of Belgrade and Zrenjanin high schools and students of University of Belgrade, Novi Sad and Niš presented in The associative dictionary of Serbian language (Asocijativni rečnik srpskog jezika, 2005). In the second part we tried to find out if our informants prefer the usage of Cyrillic or Latin alphabet, and which one they find better in the esthetic sense. We compared attitudes of students who enroll University of Priština to attitudes of students who enroll University of Belgrade and differences between their attitudes. With both researches we wanted to see if there are formed verbal stereotypes with positive or negative connotation, and what are the attitudes on using Cyrillic alphabet among students in the age of expansion of Latin alphabet. We concluded that Cyrillic alphabet is more used and valued at University of Priština than in the rest of Republic of Serbia and the reason for that might be the stronger sense of national identity among these students.