Fear of another: 40% of Albanians feel bad when they hear Serbian talk

Albanian-Serbian relations are among the most tense relations in the Western Balkan region, and municipalities in southern and northern Mitrovica are the focus of these relations.

So it was said today in northern Mitrovica, during the launching of research on the topic of CHAA, we can understand each other, implemented under the Mitrovica-based Intermediating Centre, which was implemented by the Mitrovica-based Alternative Contests Centre, while supported by the embassies of Switzerland and Norway in Kosovo.

This research, which focuses on the aspects of communication between Kosovo Albanians and Serbs, with emphasis on the Mitrovica region, was said to examine the role of language in interethnic communication and aims to examine its part (languages) in the divisions between communities.

Lazar Rakiq, programme manager at the ADRC, gave the most important statistics of this research, saying that about 40 per cent of Albanians from southern Mitrovica feel relatively bad when they listen to Serbian language, while in Serbs aged 16-25, who feel bad about Albanian language, the percentage is about 41.

“About 40 per cent of Albanians from southern Mitrovica feel relatively bad when they hear Serbian language, while about 41 per cent of young Serbs aged 16-25 feel bad or relatively bad when they hear Albanian. Only about 14 percent of residents from the south and northern Mitrovica speak each other's language ... While around 24 per cent of Albanians and Serbs surveyed from south and northern Mitrovica would learn the language of the other community”, Rakiq said.

On the other hand, Zana Syla, also programme manager at the ADRC, has cited statistics about various questions being asked to respondents from both communities, as are how often they communicate among themselves, which language they use during communication, do they think Albanian and Serbian should be taught in schools and similar questions?

According to her, research has also shown that even though over 40 per cent of respondents are unwilling to learn another community's language, slightly more than 1/3 of them know or are willing to learn the other language.

This group and those indecisive about this topic (approximately 20 percent), should be given a suitable opportunity to act on their goals, while many languages should be promoted both by civil society organisations and government institutions in order to remove portions of social stigma and the dominant perception of language as a domain or absex1>, she said.

By contrast, at the end of this presentation, some of the participants have raised questions that relate to the importance of each other's language, while confirming research data that in general interethnic relations between the southern and northern Mitrovica residents are tense and not so frequent that it may be expected of communities that live so close.