Vienna Literary Agreement

Vienna Literary Agreement is a designation of a meeting held in March 1850, when writers from Croatia, Serbia and one from Slovenia met to discuss the extent to which their literatures can be conjoined and united. They agreed in five points:

# They decided not to mix existing dialects creating new one, and that they should, following German and Italian role-model, pick one of the peoples' dialects and and select is as literary in which all books shall be written.
# They unanimously accepted that the "southern dialect" [The term "southern dialect" refers to Montenegrin dialect from the region where Vuk Karadžić originates, and to the language of Serbs of Eastern Herzegovina.] be common for literary dialect, and they all decided to write "ije" [The text of the agreement itself lists many examples of disyllabic "ije", such as "ovijeh dana", "narodnijeh narječja", "nijesu gradili novijeh", "na onijem mjestima", "ovijem", kojijem", "po ostalijem današnjijem jezicima slavenskijem" etc.] where that dialect had disyllabic reflex of yat, and write "je", "e" or "i" where the reflex is monosyllabic. In order to know precisely where the aforementioned dialect has two syllables and where only one, they asked Vuk Karadžić too write general rules on that topic which he did.
# They agreed that Serbian and Montenegrin writers should write "h" everywhere it belongs etymologically, as the Croatian writers do and some in southern regions speak.
# They all agreed that the genitive plurals of nouns and adjectives should not have "h" at the end because it doesn't belong there by etymology, because it is not necessary as a distinction towards other cases in the paradigm and because lots of writers don't write it at all.
# It was agreed that before syllabic /r/ one should not write neither "a" or "e" as some Croatian writers do, but only "r", such as in the word "prst" ('finger'), because that's the way people speak and most other writers write.

The Agreement was signed by Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski, Dimitrije Demeter, Ivan Mažuranić, Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Vinko Pacel, Franc Miklošič, Stefan Pejaković and Đuro Daničić.

Notes

External links

* [http://amac.hrvati-amac.com/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1798&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=192 Hrvati AMAC] The "second" Vienna Literary Agreement, November 20th 2007