Quale lingua, quante lingue? Note a margine di centocinquant'anni di grammaticografia italiana del serbo-croato

This article carries out a preliminary survey of a selected corpus of teaching aids (a.o., normative grammars, language courses, and phrasebooks) for the study of Serbo-Croatian as a second language, written by Italian scholars over the last 150 years. The paper aims at detecting the most recurrent argumentative strategies used by authors to substantiate the choice of a particular name for the language(s) addressed in their textbooks. Preliminary findings seem to be showing that the conventional label of “Serbo-Croatian”, very much despised (and deceivingly so) by the ruling nationalist rhetoric of post-Jugoslav republics, is the only phrasing that consistently makes room for the pluralistic relationship entertained, on a sovranational level, by single dialectal variants.