By the Rivers of Babylon: Multiculturalism in Vivo in Vojvodina/Vajdaság

Abstract

This paper contrasts the practices of interpreting and implementing official documents that regulate multilingual policies in Vojvodina (Autonomous Province of Serbia) to the experi-ence of multilingualism in everyday situations. The issues of multilingualism on paper as op-posed to everyday life are discussed within the framework of multiculturalism from a meth-odological perspective of social anthropology. The main topics of the research deal with mi-nority-majority interactions. Without the ambition to systematically investigate multilingual practices, the author’s aim is to point out certain ambiguities and shortcomings of regulating official language use in a multicultural setting such as Vojvodina. The general goal of the re-search is thus to make a link between the empirical cases of multilingual policy-making and the theoretical concept of multiculturalism.