Simonović, Marko (2012). “Ik ben toch niet gek!“ – Othering en normativiteit in het Nederlandse en het Servische vertoog [“I’m not crazy! – Othering and normativity in Dutch and Serbian discourse]. In Jelica Novaković-Lopušina, Tamara Britka, Bojana Budimir, Mirko Cvetković, & Lada Vukomanović (Eds.), Lage landen, hoge heuvels: Handelingen Regionaal Colloquium Neerlandicum (pp. 43-59). Belgrado: ARIUS/Filološki fakultet u Beogradu. PDF (pre-publication version on the author’s Academia page)
The goal of this contribution is twofold. On the one hand, it looks at the “normality” continuum in Serbian and Dutch (comparable to crazy > awkward/weird > strange > peculiar > normal > common in English), in an attempt to identify the main similarities and differences using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. On the other hand, it proposes to move away from the comparison paradigm. Instead, it develops an account approaching languages diffractively (à la Karen Barad), as an ongoing intra-action. Under such an approach, the role of the practices of the (broadly defined) bilingual speaker changes radically: the speaker is invited to live the difference productively and to overcome the ideology of sameness and representationalism. The bilingual speaker is always consigned to being more-than-normal and accountable for how she speaks the constitutive boundary.
But there is more. The goal of this contribution is to spoil othering/normativity/universality for the reader, strategically using the insight that not only are different things “crazy” in different discourses, but also the very scale of measuring “crazy” is discourse/language-specific and ever-becoming. In this sense, there is no transcendental norm(ality) to measure against, only what we make of what has been entrusted to us.
Approximate application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner
