L' "ideologizzazione" degli alfabeti in Bulgaria e Croazia nel contesto post-imperiale e post-socialista

My thesis analyses the relationship between writing systems and ethnic cohesion in the processes of national identity construction in Bulgaria and Croatia. I investigate the role played by alphabetic questions in the course of some critical moments of socio-politic passage in both of the countries, corresponding to the inter-war and post-imperial period and to the most recent post-socialist one. With such aim, I consider several texts related to “alphabetic disputes” (in reference with the Cyrillic/Latin debate), coming from representatives of the intellectual and cultural field, integrated in some cases with official legal documents related to writing matters and inscribed in the respective signification space at a national and international ideological level. The aim is to highlight the fact that delicate questions in the field of writing systems with the respective choices on the matter reflect the positioning of the countries in different political and cultural contexts, representing the attempt to construct a national narrative in line with the historical moment and the dominant identitary ideology. In addition to this, I will prove that the national construction serves itself of the element of the alphabet in order to affirm in a highly symbolic way its identity in relation to a significant “Other”, in what can be interpreted as a symptom of an assimilatory fear that has never been appeased, characteristic of the Balkan area.