According to this view, the Cyrillic script-seen as the keeper of Serb national identity-is under ‘attack’ from the Croatian language and the Latin script, together with Orthodoxy itself. In the minds of the discourse creators, the Cyrillic script-used parallel to the Latin script in the Serbian version of the polycentric, standardized Serbo-Croatian language-is being oppressed, and is thus in the process of being erased from use. This is the summa of the contemporary debate (for lack of better words other than ‘debate’, having in mind that opposing views are disregarded almost in their entirety) about the state of the Cyrillic script in Serbia. In 2005, a member of the Society for the protection of the Cyrillic script, a socially and politically active organization aptly named-‘The Cyrillic script’ ( Ćirilica, Ser-Cro.)-summed up the worries of the Society: there is ‘violence over the Cyrillic script and over everything that is Serbian’ (Vidić 2005). As the article will show, this is achieved by assertive, declarative discourse. This article deals with the contemporary nationalist linguist discourse on the topic of the Serbian version of the polycentric standardized Serbo-Croatian language, its discursive connections to religion, nationality and the Otherizing of Croatia as the discursive Other against which a Serbian language needs to be constructed. Since most scholarly production has been dealing with nationalist linguistics related to the breakup of Serbo-Croatian during and in the immediate aftermath of the wars of the Yugoslav secession, not much has been written on the current state of nationalist linguistics in Serbia in the 21st century. Even though contemporary linguistics still classifies Serbo-Croatian as one language with regional varieties (commonly dubbed ‘polycentric standardized languages’ in linguistics), nationalist linguists have been working tirelessly to discursively construct their own, local languages, based on national identity, script and religion. Ever since the wars of the Yugoslav secession in the nineties, linguistic nationalism has proven to have been among the more relevant instances in the discursive construction of national identity and new languages, dubbed by Ranko Bugarski as ‘administrative successors’ of Serbo-Croatian.

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