Nemanja's Post

Analogy: Orwell’s article and the newspaper article from Montenegro

“Nothing new in Brussels” from Republika, 5th March 2005

As Orwell refers to it in his essay on the connection between the politics and the language in UK, there is a certain level of decline in almost all languages around the globe, not just in English. He mentions several arguments to support his claim and the reasons for the decadency and gives advises in order to improve or at least to get the language back on its previous level as it was before.
Commonly, politicians and other public speakers are keen on picking the whole phrases that have already been said by so many people, making their effort less demanding this way and their job easier. Exactly as Orwell describes, we often use simple, over-used metaphors, meaningless words and above all the foreign diction! In the article I chose to analyse, the author quotes the words of the Montenegrin Prime Minister right before and after his visit to the European Parliament in Brussels and meeting with Mr.Javier Solana. On the conference in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro, Milo Djukanovic, Montenegrin PM, made a speech one day before the mentioned visit. In it he said:

Montenegro and its democratic government will not be taught a lesson there in Brussels. I will firmly represent the demands of the majority for the earliest independence and the recovering of the Montenegrin sovereignty as well as entering the Europe as a democratic, open and modern state.

A phrase like –teaching someone a lesson- is so worn-out and used by the people of the lowest level of education, therefore I don’t find it appropriate for the speech of one government’s president. Djukanovic could have simply said:”We will not be criticised” and it would be accepted. “The demands of majority” and “independist” ideas are the words that are heard every day in Montenegro while “independist” is a twisted foreign word for which we have our own in Serbian; but still our PM decides to speak foreign rather than Serbian language words. Word Europe is wrongly used since Montenegro IS geographically a part of the European continent, so when wanting to say EU, our PM says Europe! This way, we could interpret him, as saying that Montenegro is NOWHERE!
After the visit, Djukanovic made another Press Conference. There he resembled the examples of Orwell when he said: “Montenegro will not open the Pandora’s box, we will continue to “europeanize” and “democratize” “…whatever these word meant. Pandora’s box is a myth from Ancient Greece and suits more for the fairy tales, history lessons and novels rather than politician’s speech. Maybe it is a way of manipulating people who might don’t even know what the myth is about. Instead, wasn’t it easier to say “Montenegro will not endanger the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, created by the European Union”? Words like “europeanize” and “democratize” are in daily use, but however we still don’t know what they mean. Anyway, they can neither be found in English nor Serbian dictionaries, but are part of our politicians' vocabulary.
I hope that you could realise from this analysis how even other languages are in decline due to transition, different political movements etc. Moreover, even we as students are used to implement the whole phrases, foreign words in our mother tongues. Our College as well is an example of endangering the beauty of our languages (twisting words like drop, skip, and block in our language). Therefore I agree completely with Orwell that not only politicians but also all of us are guilty for the decline of our languages!