It is not completely unknown to medicine, psychology and sociolinguistics. Fear of language. Ever since about a hundred thousand years ago, our ancestors articulated their monkey roars into voices and began to communicate in the first human language, their greatest enemies were no longer saber-toothed tigers, but unknown hominids whose appearance was completely identical to theirs, but roaring was completely unknown to them . It is in the primeval nature of man to fear what he does not understand, and there is nothing in this world that living man understands less than a foreign language. The foreign language was invented precisely so that he does not understand it.
In Kobe, the shop assistant will yell at you in the most terrible way, and you will run away cursing your mother and your carelessness in front of the proud guardians of Japanese tradition, all because you didn't understand that the guy just told you that you have eyes the color of imperial green jade and asked if you might marry him. A voluptuous Hungarian woman in Podgora will ask you for casual sex, and you will be terrified to give her your wallet, wristwatch, and wedding ring. You will tell, for example, how you escaped a psychopathic neo-Nazi mass murderer at the last minute in Dormstadt, because you did not realize that a poor German student recited to you the famous thirty-second canto of Heinrich Heine's "Lyrical Intermezzo", "Schöne, helle, goldne Sterne/ grüßt die Liebste in der Ferne". Not to mention the unfortunate Arabs - whose usual and polite "good day" or "goodbye" the police block off the city center - not to mention.
Today we may not understand Japanese, Hungarian, German or Arabic, but we understand the mechanisms that make us fear them. This fear is listed in the catalog of fears under the professional name of xenoglossophobia. In an unknown foreign language, people feel insecure and threatened, and even scared, as in a wild jungle where every foreign word is a dangerous and bloodthirsty beast. No one ever, you noticed, hearing a completely unknown language think that a stranger had just told him that he had eyes the color of imperial green jade, or that he wanted casual sex, or that he was reciting a lyrical poem about the bright stars above. Or to just tell him, what do you know, "good morning".
In medicine, psychology and sociolinguistics, I said, xenoglossophobia is not an unknown thing. Moreover, the anxiety of man in his own mother tongue is not unknown either. Perhaps you didn't even know that in the catalog of human fears there is a professional name for this type of anxiety - schizoglossia.
The term "schizoglossia" was introduced into linguistic science exactly fifty years ago, in April 1962, at a conference on linguistic studies at the American Georgetown University. From the ancient Greek words σχίζειν, schizein, which means "to split in half", and γλῶσσα, glossa, "language", i.e. "speech", schizoglossia was coined by dr. Einar Haugen, distinguished professor from the University of Wisconsin and pioneer of American sociolinguistics, who gave a lecture on "Schizoglossia and Linguistic Norms" at the round table on bilingualism.
Haugen was of Norwegian roots and spoke equally from the experience of Norway, where the government introduced a standard between two equal varieties of Norwegian in those very years, as well as from his American experience, i.e. the experience of people unsure of their language between American and British English. In both cases - as indeed in any, as Professor Haugen said, "complex society" - native speakers develop anxiety about the normative mother tongue, in which they feel like foreigners, or at least not Norwegian enough or bad Americans.
Schizoglossia is a good term, because it is not a classic phobia: it is anxiety, not fear. Fear of one's own language is something else entirely. Norwegians and Americans do not know what fear is. If Professor Einar Haugen had lived long enough, a nice sociolinguistic challenge for him would have been the discovery that there is a society and people who do not feel anxiety in their mother tongue, but a classic phobia. Not even an ordinary phobia, but an uncontrolled, panicky fear.
In the history of the human race, in all the hundreds of thousands of years since the first Sapiens articulate their monkey howls into voices and began to communicate in the first human language, there has never been, and still is, a nation that is so fearful of its own language as the Croats are of their mother tongue.
It is not, namely, that Croats feel insecure and anxious about the Croatian language. Foreigners who have mastered the standard Croatian language may feel insecure and anxious in the standard Croatian language - if, of course, for the purposes of this experiment, we assume that the standard Croatian language can be mastered at all. This is because the Croatian language standard, unlike the other Babylonian language standards, was not introduced to standardize communication in the organization of society. The Croatian language standard, namely, was introduced because and only because it differs from Serbian.
Because of this, Croats do not only feel insecure and anxious when speaking the Croatian language: they fear the Croatian language in a panic. And they are panicking in it - Serbian. The Serbian language is, namely, the most terrible and deadly of all living and dead languages.
For laymen from American and Norwegian linguistic studies, the phenomenon is easiest to compare with an example from the world of mushroom growing. The Croatian language, for example, is an edible and extremely tasty pearl mushroom with a pink cap with reddish dots, and the Serbian one is an almost completely identical mushroom, except for the shade of the darker cap, but actually an extremely poisonous panther fly that causes stomach cramps, hallucinations, agony and death. Croatian sociolinguistics knows many documented cases where someone accidentally uttered a Serbian word and ended up in the nearest trauma center, or died at the same time from internal bleeding, brain contusion, or a sudden caliber 7,62 in the cardiovascular system.
Unlike Americans or Norwegians, Croats are not afraid of their native language because they, as native speakers, feel insufficiently Croatian or bad Croatian, but because according to the standard mother tongue, they are not Croatian at all. Which would not be such a problem if the non-Croats were Americans or Norwegians. The problem with the Croatian language is that a Croat living in it as a non-Croat can only be a Serb. In the standard Croatian language, in short, a functionally oral Croat with his colloquial spoken Croatian is not a potential foreigner, but a potential Chetnik.
In Split, you'll run headlong out of the store, cursing your mother and your carelessness in front of the proud guardians of Croatian tradition, all because you didn't understand that the kind cashier at the cash register had just politely taught you that in Croatian you don't say "change" or "thousand". A voluptuous Croatian widow in Podgora will complain to you that she is needy, and you will immediately give her a wallet, a wristwatch, and a wedding ring. You will tell, for example, how in Vukovar you once escaped a psychopathic Serbian mass murderer at the last minute, because you did not realize that a poor student recited to you the early poems of Tino Ujević. Let's not even talk about the unfortunate Croats whose most ordinary "nice" or "hello" is blocked off by the police in the city center.
The Croatian language intelligence service is even worse than the secret police in East Germany, where only half the population worked for the Stasi, spying on half the nation. In Croatia, everyone spies on everyone. Terrified by the dangerous and terrible mother tongue, everyone monitors everyone, everyone is at the same time an insidious Serbian speaker and a diligent Croatian proofreader. For more than thirty years now, the unfortunate Croats have been walking through their own mother tongue like a minefield, in a fragmented and parallel reality. In which - just one random example - for a place where some goods are sold, the standard Croatian language knows only two words, "prodavaonica" and "trovina", and yet no one has ever in his entire life said that he "goes to the store", nor "bought something at the store".
As you can see, I myself am a bit amateur in sociolinguistics, so I am on the trail of Dr. Einar Haugen came up with a term that could quite well cover this completely endemic fear and distorted perception of linguistic reality in the catalog of fears. From the ancient Greek σχίζειν, "to split in half", and φρήν, "fren", which would mean "thought", I coined the term - "schizophrenia".
I just have to figure out how to say it in Croatian.
Bonus video:
